Rider on the Storm

In the summer of 1959, a pair of F-8 Crusader combat jets were on a routine flight to Beaufort, North Carolina with no particular designs on making history. The late afternoon sunlight glinted from the silver and orange fuselages as the US Marine Corps pilots flew high above the Carolina coast at near the speed of sound. The lead jet was piloted by 39-year-old Lt Col William Rankin, a veteran of both World War 2 and the Korean War. In another Crusader followed his wingman, Lt Herbert Nolan. The pilots were cruising at 47,000 feet to stay above a large, surly-looking column of cumulonimbus cloud which was amassing about a half mile below them, threatening to moisten the officers upon their arrival at the air field.

Mere minutes before they were scheduled to begin their descent towards Beaufort, William Rankin heard a decreasingly reassuring series of grinding sounds coming from his aircraft's engine. The airframe shuddered, and most of the indicator needles on his array of cockpit instruments flopped into their fluorescent orange “something is horribly wrong” regions. The engine had stopped cold. As the unpowered aircraft dipped earthward, Lt Col Rankin switched on his Crusader's emergency generator to electrify his radio. “Power failure,” Rankin transmitted matter-of-factly to Nolan. “May have to eject.”

Unable to restart his engine, and struggling to keep his craft from entering a near-supersonic nose dive, Rankin grasped the two emergency eject handles. He was mindful of his extreme altitude, and of the serious discomfort that would accompany the sudden decompression of an ejection; but although he lacked a pressure suit, he knew that his oxygen mask should keep him breathing in the rarefied atmosphere nine miles up. He was also wary of the ominous gray soup of a storm that lurked below; but having previously experienced a bail out amidst enemy fire in Korea, a bit of inclement weather didn't seem all that off-putting. At approximately 6:00 pm, Lt Col Rankin concluded that his aircraft was unrecoverable and pulled hard on his eject handles. An explosive charge propelled him from the cockpit into the atmosphere with sufficient force to rip his left glove from his hand, scattering his canopy, pilot seat, and other plane-related debris into the sky. Bill Rankin had spent a fair amount of time skydiving in his career—both premeditated and otherwise—but this particular dive would be unlike any that he or any living person had experienced before.  (...)

After falling for a mere 10 seconds, Bill Rankin penetrated the top of the anvil-shaped storm. The dense gray cloud smothered out the summer sun, and the temperature dropped rapidly. In less than a minute the extreme cold and wind began to inflict Rankin's extremities with frostbite; particularly his gloveless left hand. The wind was a cacophony inside his flight helmet. Freezing, injured, and unable to see more than a few feet in the murky cloud, the Lieutenant Colonel mustered all of his will to keep his hand far from the rip cord.

After falling through damp darkness for an interminable time, Rankin began to grow concerned that the automatic switch on his parachute had malfunctioned. He felt certain that he had been descending for several minutes, though he was aware that one's sense of time is a fickle thing under such distracting circumstances. He fingered the rip cord anxiously, wondering whether to give it a yank. He'd lost all feeling in his left hand, and his other limbs weren't faring much better. It was then that he felt a sharp and familiar upward tug on his harness--his parachute had deployed. It was too dark to see the chute's canopy above him, but he tugged on the risers and concluded that it had indeed inflated properly. This was a welcome reprieve from the wet-and-windy free-fall.

Unfortunately for the impaired pilot, he was nowhere near the 10,000 foot altitude he expected. Strong updrafts in the cell had decreased his terminal velocity substantially, and the volatile storm had triggered his barometric parachute switch prematurely. Bill Rankin was still far from the earth, and he was now dangling helplessly in the belly of an oblivious monstrosity.

“I'd see lightning,” Rankin would later muse, “Boy, do I remember that lightning. I never exactly heard the thunder; I felt it.” Amidst the electrical spectacle, the storm's capricious winds pressed Rankin downward until he encountered the powerful updrafts—the same updrafts that keep hailstones aloft as they accumulate ice--which dragged him and his chute thousands of feet back up into the storm. This dangerous effect is familiar to paragliding enthusiasts, who unaffectionately refer to it as cloud suck. At the apex Rankin caught up with his parachute, causing it to drape over him like a wet blanket and stir worries that he would become entangled with it and drop from the sky at a truly terminal velocity. Again he fell, and again the updrafts yanked him skyward in the darkness. He lost count of how many times this up-and-down cycle repeated. “At one point I got seasick and heaved,” he once retold.

by Alan Bellows, Damn Interesting |  Read more:

Image: Damn Interesting

h/t 3 Quarks Daily

Guillermo Carrion, 2012. NYC, Oil and spray on canvas
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How College Bowls Got Over-Commercialized

[ed. ...not to mention the stadiums these games might be played in.]

In David Foster Wallace's futuristic 1996 novel Infinite Jest, years are no longer referred to by numbers: You just have to remember that Year of the Perdue Wonderchicken comes after the Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar. This is only a little weirder and a little less funny than what has actually happened to college football. The Peach Bowl is now the Chick-fil-A Bowl, the Citrus Bowl is the Capital One Bowl, and the Motor City Bowl is the Little Caesars Pizza Bowl. Other teams will be competing at the Outback Bowl, the Insight Bowl, the MAACO Bowl Las Vegas, the Meineke Car Care Bowl, the Kraft Fight Hunger Bowl, the Military Bowl, and the Beef 'O' Brady's Bowl. You know sponsorships are a little too easy to come by when a chain restaurant known for its chili is willing to put its name that close to the word "bowl."

Unlike other major sports governing bodies, college football's—the National Collegiate Athletic Assn.—doesn't run its own postseason. Instead, it allows private companies to start their own bowl games, invite teams to play, and then—if they choose—bring on weird sponsors. It's such a free-market system that Dan Wetzel, co-author of the new book Death to the BCS—meaning the Bowl Championship Series, the organization that runs the bowl system—says, "I could start a bowl."

The current bowl system is unpopular with just about everybody. Only 26 percent of fans like it, according to a Quinnipiac University poll. Barack Obama and John McCain campaigned against it, and it pulls in a lot less money than a March Madness-type playoff system would. "It's the only business that outsources its most profitable product," says Wetzel. "Other than to see their own team, nobody says, 'I have to go to the Humanitarian Bowl!' " While no other business would spend decades investing in a program only to hand it over to a third party—in Boise, no less—dozens do every year despite a murky payoff. Says Wetzel: "There's nothing like holding up a trophy from the galleryfurniture.com Bowl."

With 70 teams playing in bowl games this year, lots of stadiums will be pretty empty. While bowls can profit from requiring schools to buy blocks of full-price tickets to sell to fans, few institutions can unload their bounty—particularly when they're playing in a bowl in Idaho. Even at the non-ridiculous 2009 FedEx (FDX) Orange Bowl (now the Discovery Orange Bowl), Virginia Tech sold only 20 percent of the 17,500 tickets it bought for $120 apiece. It lost $1.77 million.

Still, virtually all colleges play along, often so they can tell recruits and donors they went to a bowl game—even the Beef 'O' Brady's Bowl. And many coaches and athletic directors, who run the bowl system, get bonuses for getting their teams into a bowl—even the Beef 'O' Brady's Bowl. "These bowls are a scam," says Brian Frederick, executive director of the Sports Fans Coalition, a lobbyist group. "They make money by selling names to sponsors. That's why you get these awful names. The uDrove Humanitarian Bowl? What the hell is that?" It's a bowl game in Idaho.

by Bloomberg Businessweek |  Read more:

Photograph: Chris Keane/Reuters via:

Five Jobs in Reading

The game of Monopoly has four railroads: B&O, Short Line, Reading, and Pennsylvania. As a child I assumed that this meant Monopoly took place in my home town of Reading, Pennsylvania. It doesn’t, of course. It takes place in Atlantic City, never mind that the B&O didn’t send trains to Atlantic City, and that the Short Line isn’t real.

But the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad was very real. It was at one time the biggest corporation in the world, owning not only the major mid-Atlantic coal shipping railways but the ports that sent it overseas, and eventually the coal mines themselves. It was so big, in fact, that its monopoly on anthracite mining and distribution forced the Supreme Court to break it up in the 1870s, back when this was the sort of thing the Supreme Court did. The Reading also had a modest passenger line; at one time a traveler could ride the rails between Harrisburg, Shamokin, Jersey City, and Philadelphia. But when the coal industry dried up, so did the Railroad. Highways were built, American car culture exploded, and in 1976 the Reading ceased to exist. CONRAIL now runs much of what remains, although there is no passenger train and significantly less coal and iron to ship. Of course the tracks persist, crisscrossing the city as they make their way up and down the east coast, reminding commuters of what an alternative might have looked like.

Reading is not a particularly large city. Its population, which hovers around 80,000, is spread out over approximately ten square miles that stretch from the Schuylkill River uphill to Mt. Penn. It is difficult to describe the particularity of Reading’s urban depression—even more so to account for it. It was a wealthy iron and garment manufacturing town in the 1800s, continued its economic growth into the 1930s, then entered into a slow, painful process of impoverishment beginning in the 1940s. This has since included the loss of the railroad, of heavy manufacturing, and of middle-class white people. But Reading’s decline was not uniform. It also had a number of “rebirths” that began as promises of renewed glory and ended in the realities of recalcitrant poverty and crime. Reading was once, for example, “famous for its outlet shopping,” a phrase I heard frequently from mothers of friends in other towns. Indeed, Reading built a fairly large industry around closeout, mis-sized, as-is “designer brand” apparel and home goods. Buses would bring in shoppers from all over the east coast as restaurants, hair and nail salons, and coffee shops sprouted to feed and pamper them. But now there are outlet malls all over the country. Designer brands have even created outlet labels so that retail customers can shop without fear of accidentally purchasing the same shirt as some deal-hunting cheapskate, and outlet shoppers can still savor the belief that some idiot paid twice as much for their socks, even though no idiot ever has. The outlets are still in Reading, but they don’t host the same crowded, frantic weekend shopping orgies I remember from my youth. Why travel to a city that is consistently ranked among the top twenty-five most dangerous places in America when you can buy your discount jeans at a clean stucco strip mall in New Jersey? They probably even have a Chipotle.

But the outlet collapse pales in comparison to Reading’s more recent and familiar recession story. In 2007, Reading was hoping to capitalize on its proximity to New York and Philadelphia, as well as on miles of underdeveloped riverfront property. The city even began making it onto lists of “up and coming” places for housing speculators. The local professional class, safely tucked away in suburban neighborhoods, started to dream of urban boutiques and crime-free, tree-lined strolls along the river. Then in 2008 the bubble burst, plans were abandoned, and, by the 2010 census, Reading was declared the poorest city in America. The wealthy consumer class lost a pipe dream, and many of Reading’s working class and poor lost everything.

by Chris Reitz, N+1 |  Read more:

Image source: uncredited

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The Ecstasy of Influence

All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated. . . .—John Donne

Consider this tale: a cultivated man of middle age looks back on the story of an amour fou, one beginning when, traveling abroad, he takes a room as a lodger. The moment he sees the daughter of the house, he is lost. She is a preteen, whose charms instantly enslave him. Heedless of her age, he becomes intimate with her. In the end she dies, and the narrator — marked by her forever — remains alone. The name of the girl supplies the title of the story: Lolita.

The author of the story I’ve described, Heinz von Lichberg, published his tale of Lolita in 1916, forty years before Vladimir Nabokov’s novel. Lichberg later became a prominent journalist in the Nazi era, and his youthful works faded from view. Did Nabokov, who remained in Berlin until 1937, adopt Lichberg’s tale consciously? Or did the earlier tale exist for Nabokov as a hidden, unacknowledged memory? The history of literature is not without examples of this phenomenon, called cryptomnesia. Another hypothesis is that Nabokov, knowing Lichberg’s tale perfectly well, had set himself to that art of quotation that Thomas Mann, himself a master of it, called “higher cribbing.” Literature has always been a crucible in which familiar themes are continually recast. Little of what we admire in Nabokov’s Lolita is to be found in its predecessor; the former is in no way deducible from the latter. Still: did Nabokov consciously borrow and quote?

“When you live outside the law, you have to eliminate dishonesty.” The line comes from Don Siegel’s 1958 film noir, The Lineup, written by Stirling Silliphant. The film still haunts revival houses, likely thanks to Eli Wallach’s blazing portrayal of a sociopathic hit man and to Siegel’s long, sturdy auteurist career. Yet what were those words worth — to Siegel, or Silliphant, or their audience — in 1958? And again: what was the line worth when Bob Dylan heard it (presumably in some Greenwich Village repertory cinema), cleaned it up a little, and inserted it into “Absolutely Sweet Marie”? What are they worth now, to the culture at large?

Appropriation has always played a key role in Dylan’s music. The songwriter has grabbed not only from a panoply of vintage Hollywood films but from Shakespeare and F. Scott Fitzgerald and Junichi Saga’s Confessions of a Yakuza. He also nabbed the title of Eric Lott’s study of minstrelsy for his 2001 album Love and Theft. One imagines Dylan liked the general resonance of the title, in which emotional misdemeanors stalk the sweetness of love, as they do so often in Dylan’s songs. Lott’s title is, of course, itself a riff on Leslie Fiedler’s Love and Death in the American Novel, which famously identifies the literary motif of the interdependence of a white man and a dark man, like Huck and Jim or Ishmael and Queequeg — a series of nested references to Dylan’s own appropriating, minstrel-boy self. Dylan’s art offers a paradox: while it famously urges us not to look back, it also encodes a knowledge of past sources that might otherwise have little home in contemporary culture, like the Civil War poetry of the Confederate bard Henry Timrod, resuscitated in lyrics on Dylan’s newest record, Modern Times. Dylan’s originality and his appropriations are as one. (...)

In 1941, on his front porch, Muddy Waters recorded a song for the folklorist Alan Lomax. After singing the song, which he told Lomax was entitled “Country Blues,” Waters described how he came to write it. “I made it on about the eighth of October ’38,” Waters said. “I was fixin’ a puncture on a car. I had been mistreated by a girl. I just felt blue, and the song fell into my mind and it come to me just like that and I started singing.” Then Lomax, who knew of the Robert Johnson recording called “Walkin’ Blues,” asked Waters if there were any other songs that used the same tune. “There’s been some blues played like that,” Waters replied. “This song comes from the cotton field and a boy once put a record out — Robert Johnson. He put it out as named ‘Walkin’ Blues.’ I heard the tune before I heard it on the record. I learned it from Son House.” In nearly one breath, Waters offers five accounts: his own active authorship: he “made it” on a specific date. Then the “passive” explanation: “it come to me just like that.” After Lomax raises the question of influence, Waters, without shame, misgivings, or trepidation, says that he heard a version by Johnson, but that his mentor, Son House, taught it to him. In the middle of that complex genealogy, Waters declares that “this song comes from the cotton field." (...)

I was born in 1964; I grew up watching Captain Kangaroo, moon landings, zillions of TV ads, the Banana Splits, M*A*S*H, and The Mary Tyler Moore Show. I was born with words in my mouth — “Band-Aid,” “Q-tip,” “Xerox” — object-names as fixed and eternal in my logosphere as “taxicab” and “toothbrush.” The world is a home littered with pop-culture products and their emblems. I also came of age swamped by parodies that stood for originals yet mysterious to me — I knew Monkees before Beatles, Belmondo before Bogart, and “remember” the movie Summer of ’42 from aMad magazine satire, though I’ve still never seen the film itself. I’m not alone in having been born backward into an incoherent realm of texts, products, and images, the commercial and cultural environment with which we’ve both supplemented and blotted out our natural world. I can no more claim it as “mine” than the sidewalks and forests of the world, yet I do dwell in it, and for me to stand a chance as either artist or citizen, I’d probably better be permitted to name it.

Consider Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer:

Other people, so I have read, treasure memorable moments in their lives: the time one climbed the Parthenon at sunrise, the summer night one met a lonely girl in Central Park and achieved with her a sweet and natural relationship, as they say in books. I too once met a girl in Central Park, but it is not much to remember. What I remember is the time John Wayne killed three men with a carbine as he was falling to the dusty street in Stagecoach, and the time the kitten found Orson Welles in the doorway in The Third Man.

Today, when we can eat Tex-Mex with chopsticks while listening to reggae and watching a YouTube rebroadcast of the Berlin Wall’s fall — i.e., when damn near everything presents itself as familiar — it’s not a surprise that some of today’s most ambitious art is going about trying to make the familiar strange. In so doing, in reimagining what human life might truly be like over there across the chasms of illusion, mediation, demographics, marketing, imago, and appearance, artists are paradoxically trying to restore what’s taken for “real” to three whole dimensions, to reconstruct a univocally round world out of disparate streams of flat sights.

by Jonathan Lethem, Harpers (2007) | Read more:
Image: Wikipedia

When You Swallow A Grenade

It is hard to imagine a time when a scratch could so easily lead to death. Albert Alexander died precisely at the dawn of the Antibiotic Era. Shortly after failing to save Alexander’s life, Florey harvested more penicillin and gave it to another patient at the hospital, a 15-year-old boy who had developed an infection during surgery. They cured him in a few days. Within three years of Alexander’s death, Pfizer was manufacturing penicillin on an industrial scale, packing 7500-gallon tanks with mold, fed on corn steep liquor. In that same year, Selman Waksman, a Rutgers microbiologist, and his colleagues discovered antibiotics made by soil bacteria, such as streptomycin and neomycin.

What made antibiotics so wildly successful was the way they attacked bacteria while sparing us. Penicillin, for example, stops many types of bacteria from building their cell walls. Our own cells are built in a fundamentally different way, and so the drug has no effect. While antibiotics can discriminate between us and them, however, they can’t discriminate between them and them–between the bacteria that are making us sick and then ones we carry when we’re healthy. When we take a pill of vancomycin, it’s like swallowing a grenade. It may kill our enemy, but it kills a lot of bystanders, too.  (...)

Each of us is home to several thousand species. (I’m only talking about bacteria, by the way–viruses, fungi, and protozoans stack an even higher level of diversity on top of the bacterial biodiversity.) My own belly button, I’ve been reliably informed, contains at least 53 species. Many of the species I harbor are different than the ones you harbor. But if you look at the kinds of genes carried by those species, our microbiomes look very similar. That’s partly because surviving on a human body requires certain skills, so any species that is going to last long in your lungs, say, will need many of the same genes.

But the similarity speaks to something else. The microbiome keeps us healthy. It breaks down some of our food into digestible molecules, it detoxifies poisons, it serves as a shield on our skin and internal linings to keep out pathogens, and it nurtures our immune systems, instructing them in the proper balance between vigilance and tolerance. It’s a dependence we’ve been evolving for 700 million years, ever since our early animal ancestors evolved bodies that bacteria could colonize. (Even jellyfish and sponges have microbiomes.) If you think of the human genome as all the genes it takes to run a human body, the 20,000 protein-coding genes found in our own DNA are not enough. We are a superorganism that deploys as many as 20 million genes.

It’s not easy to track what happens to this complex organ of ours when we take antibiotics. Monitoring the microbiome of a single person demands a lot of medical, microbiological, and genomic expertise. And it’s hard to generalize, since each case has its own quirks. What happens to the microbiome depends on the particular kind of bacteria infecting people, the kind of antibiotics people take, the state of their microbiome beforehand, their own health, and even their own genes (well, the human genes, at least). And then there’s the question of how long these effects last. If there’s a change to the microbiome for a few weeks, does that change vanish within a few months? Or are there effects only emerge years later?

Scientists are only now beginning to get answers to those questions. In a paper just published online in the journal Gut, Andres Moya of the University of Valencia and his colleagues took an unprecedented look at a microbiome weathering a storm of antibiotics. The microbiome belonged to a 68-year-old man who had developed an infection in his pacemaker. A two-week course of antbiotics cleared it up nicely. Over the course of his treatment, Moya and his colleagues collected stool samples from the man every few days, and then six weeks afterwards. They identified the species in the stool, as well as the genes that the bacteria switched on and off.

What’s most striking about Moya’s study is how the entire microbiome responded to the antibiotics as if it was under a biochemical mortar attack. The bacteria started producing defenses to keep the deadly molecules from getting inside them. To get rid of the drugs that did get inside them, they produced pumps to blast them back out. Meanwhile, the entire microbiome powered down its metabolism. This is probably a good strategy for enduring antibiotics, which typically attack the molecules that bacteria use to grow. As the bacteria shut down, they had a direct effect on their host: they stopped making vitamins and carrying out other metabolic tasks.

by Carl Zimmer, National Geographic |  Read more:

Photo: Health Research Board on Flickr via Creative Commons

Talking Heads (Life During Wartime)

Lyrics via:

Buffeted by the Web, but Now Riding It

[ed. Wirecutter is a great site...it's how I came to lust after a pair of these.]

When the consumer Web exploded in the mid-1990s, part of the promise was that it would transform careers and the concept of work. Remember the signs on telephone poles and banners all over the Internet? “Work at home and turn your computer into a cash register! Ask me how.” The next generation of Americans would be able to work on their own terms.

It didn’t turn out that way. If anything, digital technology has overwhelmed those who sought to master it. The Web may be a technological marvel, but to most people who use it for work, it functions like an old-fashioned hamster wheel, except at Internet speed.

Brian Lam was both a prince and a casualty of that realm. After interning at Wired, he became the editor of Gizmodo, Gawker Media’s gadget blog. A trained Thai boxer, he focused his aggression on cranking out enough copy to increase the site’s traffic, to a peak of 180 million page views from 13 million in the five years he was there.

He and his writers broke news, sent shrapnel into many subject areas with provocative, opinionated copy and was part of the notorious pilfered iPhone 4 story that had law enforcement officials breaking down doors on Apple’s behalf. I saw Mr. Lam on occasional trips to San Francisco, and he crackled with jumpy digital energy.

And then, he burned out at age 34. He loved the ocean, but his frantic digital existence meant his surfboard was gathering cobwebs. “I came to hate the Web, hated chasing the next post or rewriting other people’s posts just for the traffic,” he told me. “People shouldn’t live like robots.”

So he quit Gizmodo, and though he had several lucrative offers, he decided to do exactly nothing. He sold his car, rented out his house, took time to mull things over and eventually moved to Hawaii because he loves surfing.

This is the point in the story where we generally find out that the techie is now a wood carver, or an oboe player.

But leopards don’t change their spots, and they certainly don’t turn into unicorns. An accomplished technologist and writer, Mr. Lam worked to come up with a business that he could command instead of the other way around.

The problem is that these days, ad-supported media business models all depend on scale, because rates go lower every day. Success in Web media generally requires constant posting to build a big audience. Mr. Lam knew where that led.

With friends — including Brian X. Chen, who now works at The New York Times — he came up with his own version of a gadget site. But instead of chasing down every tidbit of tech news, he built The Wirecutter, a recommendation site that posts six to 12 updates a month — not a day — and began publishing in partnership with The Awl, a federation of blogs founded by two other veterans of Gawker Media, Choire Sicha and Alex Balk.

While there are many technology sites that evaluate and compare products, usually burying their assessments in a tsunami of other posts, Mr. Lam and his staff of freelancers decided to rely on deep examinations of specific product categories.

Using expert opinions, aggregated reviews and personal research, they recommend a single product in each category. There are no complicated rankings or deep analytics on the entire category. If you want new earphones or a robot vacuum, The Wirecutter will recommend The One and leave it at that.

by David Carr, NY Times |  Read more:

Photo: Kent Nishimura for The New York Times

The Queen breaking into laughter as she passes her husband, the Duke of Edinburgh, standing outside the Buckingham Palace, 2005.

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Joy

It hurts just as much as it is worth.
- Julian Barnes

It might be useful to distinguish between pleasure and joy. But maybe everybody does this very easily, all the time, and only I am confused. A lot of people seem to feel that joy is only the most intense version of pleasure, arrived at by the same road—you simply have to go a little further down the track. That has not been my experience. And if you asked me if I wanted more joyful experiences in my life, I wouldn’t be at all sure I did, exactly because it proves such a difficult emotion to manage. It’s not at all obvious to me how we should make an accommodation between joy and the rest of our everyday lives.

Perhaps the first thing to say is that I experience at least a little pleasure every day. I wonder if this is more than the usual amount? It was the same even in childhood when most people are miserable. I don’t think this is because so many wonderful things happen to me but rather that the small things go a long way. I seem to get more than the ordinary satisfaction out of food, for example—any old food. An egg sandwich from one of these grimy food vans on Washington Square has the genuine power to turn my day around. Whatever is put in front of me, foodwise, will usually get a five-star review.

You’d think that people would like to cook for, or eat with, me—in fact I’m told it’s boring. Where there is no discernment there can be no awareness of expertise or gratitude for special effort. “Don’t say that was delicious,” my husband warns, “you say everything’s delicious.” “But it was delicious.” It drives him crazy. All day long I can look forward to a popsicle. The persistent anxiety that fills the rest of my life is calmed for as long as I have the flavor of something good in my mouth. And though it’s true that when the flavor is finished the anxiety returns, we do not have so many reliable sources of pleasure in this life as to turn our nose up at one that is so readily available, especially here in America. A pineapple popsicle. Even the great anxiety of writing can be stilled for the eight minutes it takes to eat a pineapple popsicle.

My other source of daily pleasure is—but I wish I had a better way of putting it—”other people’s faces.” A red-headed girl, with a marvelous large nose she probably hates, and green eyes and that sun-shy complexion composed more of freckles than skin. Or a heavyset grown man, smoking a cigarette in the rain, with a soggy mustache, above which, a surprise—the keen eyes, snub nose, and cherub mouth of his own eight-year-old self. Upon leaving the library at the end of the day I will walk a little more quickly to the apartment to tell my husband about an angular, cat-eyed teenager, in skinny jeans and stacked-heel boots, a perfectly ordinary gray sweatshirt, last night’s makeup, and a silky Pocahontas wig slightly askew over his own Afro. He was sashaying down the street, plaits flying, using the whole of Broadway as his personal catwalk. “Miss Thang, but off duty.” I add this for clarity, but my husband nods a little impatiently; there was no need for the addition. My husband is also a professional gawker.

The advice one finds in ladies’ magazines is usually to be feared, but there is something in that old chestnut: “shared interests.” It does help. I like to hear about the Chinese girl he saw in the hall, carrying a large medical textbook, so beautiful she looked like an illustration. Or the tall Kenyan in the elevator whose elongated physical elegance reduced every other nearby body to the shrunken, gnarly status of a troll. Usually I will not have seen these people—my husband works on the eighth floor of the library, I work on the fifth—but simply hearing them described can be almost as much a pleasure as encountering them myself. More pleasurable still is when we recreate the walks or gestures or voices of these strangers, or whole conversations—between two people in the queue for the ATM, or two students on a bench near the fountain.

And then there are all the many things that the dog does and says, entirely anthropomorphized and usually offensive, which express the universe of things we ourselves cannot do or say, to each other or to other people. “You’re being the dog,” our child said recently, surprising us. She is almost three and all our private languages are losing their privacy and becoming known to her. Of course, we knew she would eventually become fully conscious, and that before this happened we would have to give up arguing, smoking, eating meat, using the Internet, talking about other people’s faces, and voicing the dog, but now the time has come, she is fully aware, and we find ourselves unable to change. “Stop being the dog,” she said, “it’s very silly,” and for the first time in eight years we looked at the dog and were ashamed.

Occasionally the child, too, is a pleasure, though mostly she is a joy, which means in fact she gives us not much pleasure at all, but rather that strange admixture of terror, pain, and delight that I have come to recognize as joy, and now must find some way to live with daily. This is a new problem. Until quite recently I had known joy only five times in my life, perhaps six, and each time tried to forget it soon after it happened, out of the fear that the memory of it would dement and destroy everything else.

by Zadie Smith, NY Review of Books |  Read more:

Illustration: George Bellows: Geraldine Lee, No. 2, 1914

QIN Tianzhu
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An All-American Nightmare

If you look backward you see a nightmare. If you look forward you become the nightmare.

There’s one particular nightmare that Americans need to face: in the first decade of the twenty-first century we tortured people as national policy. One day, we’re going to have to confront the reality of what that meant, of what effect it had on its victims and on us, too, we who condoned, supported, or at least allowed it to happen, either passively or with guilty (or guiltless) gusto. If not, torture won’t go away. It can’t be disappeared like the body of a political prisoner, or conveniently deep-sixed simply by wishing it elsewhere or pretending it never happened or closing our bureaucratic eyes. After the fact, torture can only be dealt with by staring directly into the nightmare that changed us -- that, like it or not, helped make us who we now are.

The president, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, has made it clear that no further investigations or inquiries will be made into America’s decade of torture. His Justice Department failed to prosecute a single torturer or any of those who helpedcover up evidence of the torture practices. But it did deliver a jail sentence to oneex-CIA officer who refused to be trained to torture and was among the first at the CIA to publicly admit that the torture program was real.

At what passes for trials at our prison camp in Guantanamo, Cuba, disclosure of the details of torture is forbidden, effectively preventing anyone from learning anything about what the CIA did with its victims. We are encouraged to do what’s best for America and, as Barack Obama put it, “look forward, not backward,” with the same zeal as, after 9/11, we were encouraged to save America by going shopping.

Looking into the Eyes of the Tortured

Torture does not leave its victims, nor does it leave a nation that condones it. As an act, it is all about pain, but even more about degradation and humiliation. It destroys its victims, but also demeans those who perpetrate it. I know, because in the course of my 24 years as a State Department officer, I spoke with two men who had been tortured, both by allies of the United States and with at least the tacit approval of Washington. While these men were tortured, Americans in a position to know chose to look the other way for reasons of politics. These men were not movie characters, but complex flesh-and-blood human beings. Meet just one of them once and, I assure you, you’ll never follow the president’s guidance and move forward trying to forget.

The Korean Poet

The first victim was a Korean poet. I was in Korea at the time as a visa officer working for the State Department at the U.S. Embassy in Seoul. Persons with serious criminal records are normally ineligible to travel to the United States. There is, however, an exception in the law for political crimes. It was initially carved out for Soviet dissidents during the Cold War years. I spoke to the poet as he applied for a visa to determine if his arrest had indeed been “political” and so not a disqualification for his trip to the U.S.

Under the brutal military dictatorship of Park Chung Hee, the poet was tortured for writing anti-government verse. To younger Americans, South Korea is the land of “Gangnam Style,” of fashionable clothing and cool, cool electronics. However, within Psy’s lifetime, his nation was ruled by a series of military autocrats, supported by the United States in the interest of “national security.”

The poet quietly explained to me that, after his work came to the notice of the powers that be, he was taken from his apartment to a small underground cell. Soon, two men arrived and beat him repeatedly on his testicles and sodomized him with one of the tools they had used for the beating. They asked him no questions. In fact, he said, they barely spoke to him at all. Though the pain was beyond his ability to describe, even as a poet, he said that the humiliation of being left so utterly helpless was what remained with him for life, destroyed his marriage, sent him to the repeated empty comfort of alcohol, and kept him from ever putting pen to paper again.

The men who destroyed him, he told me, entered the room, did their work, and then departed, as if they had many others to visit that day and needed to get on with things. The Poet was released a few days later and politely driven back to his apartment by the police in a forward-looking gesture, as if the episode of torture was over and to be forgotten.

by Peter Van Buren, TomDispatch |  Read more:

Image: Wikipedia

The Hum That Helps to Fight Crime

A rape victim has come forward to the police. She says she has confronted her attacker and has secretly recorded him admitting his guilt.

A suspected terrorist has been taped planning a deadly attack, and the police want to use this evidence in court. Or someone has been captured on CCTV threatening an assault.

Increasingly, recordings like these are playing a role in criminal investigations.

But how can the police be sure that the audio evidence is genuine, that it has not been tampered with or cleverly edited?

Forensic scientists have come up with the answer: they can authenticate these recordings with the help of a hum.

Electric find

For the last seven years, at the Metropolitan Police forensic lab in south London, audio specialists have been continuously recording the sound of mains electricity.

It is an all pervasive hum that we normally cannot hear. But boost it a little, and a metallic and not very pleasant buzz fills the air.

"The power is sent out over the national grid to factories, shops and of course our homes. Normally this frequency, known as the mains frequency, is about 50Hz," explains Dr Alan Cooper, a senior digital forensic practitioner at the Met Police.

Any digital recording made anywhere near an electrical power source, be it plug socket, light or pylon, will pick up this noise and it will be embedded throughout the audio.

This buzz is an annoyance for sound engineers trying to make the highest quality recordings. But for forensic experts, it has turned out to be an invaluable tool in the fight against crime.

by Rebecca Morelle, BBC |  Read more:

Illustration: Unknown

Grapefruit Is a Culprit in More Drug Reactions

The patient didn’t overdose on medication. She overdosed on grapefruit juice.

The 42-year-old was barely responding when her husband brought her to the emergency room. Her heart rate was slowing, and her blood pressure was falling. Doctors had to insert a breathing tube, and then a pacemaker, to revive her.

They were mystified: The patient’s husband said she suffered from migraines and was taking a blood pressure drug called verapamil to help prevent the headaches. But blood tests showed she had an alarming amount of the drug in her system, five times the safe level.

Did she overdose? Was she trying to commit suicide? It was only after she recovered that doctors were able to piece the story together.

“The culprit was grapefruit juice,” said Dr. Unni Pillai, a nephrologist in St. Louis, Mo., who treated the woman several years ago and later published a case report. “She loved grapefruit juice, and she had such a bad migraine, with nausea and vomiting, that she could not tolerate anything else.”

The previous week, she had been subsisting mainly on grapefruit juice. Then she took verapamil, one of dozens of drugs whose potency is dramatically increased if taken with grapefruit. In her case, the interaction was life-threatening.

Last month, Dr. David Bailey, a Canadian researcher who first described this interaction more than two decades ago, released an updated list of medications affected by grapefruit. There are now 85 such drugs on the market, he noted, including common cholesterol-lowering drugs, new anticancer agents, and some synthetic opiates and psychiatric drugs, as well as certain immunosuppressant medications taken by organ transplant patients, some AIDS medications, and some birth control pills and estrogen treatments. (The full list is online.)

“What drove us to write this paper was the number of new drugs that have come out in the last four years,” said Dr. Bailey, a clinical pharmacologist at the Lawson Health Research Institute, who first discovered the interaction by accident in the 1990s.

How often such reactions occur, however, and how often they are triggered in people consuming regular amounts of juice is debated by scientists. Dr. Bailey believes many cases are missed because doctors don’t think to ask if patients are consuming grapefruit or grapefruit juice.

Even if such incidents are rare, Dr. Bailey argued, they are predictable and entirely avoidable. Many hospitals no longer serve juice, and some prescriptions carry stickers warning patients to avoid grapefruit.

“The bottom line is that even if the frequency is low, the consequences can be dire,” he said. “Why do we have to have a body count before we make changes?”

For 43 of the 85 drugs now on the list, consumption with grapefruit can be life-threatening, Dr. Bailey said. Many are linked to an increase in heart rhythm, known as torsade de pointes, that can lead to death. It can occur even without underlying heart disease and has been seen in patients taking certain anticancer agents, erythromycin and other anti-infective drugs, some cardiovascular drugs like quinidine, the antipsychotics lurasidone and ziprasidone, gastrointestinal agents cisapride and domperidone, and solifenacin, used to treat overactive bladders.

Taken with grapefruit, other drugs like fentanyl, oxycodone and methadone can cause fatal respiratory depression. The interaction also can be caused by other citrus fruits, including Seville oranges, limes and pomelos; one published case report has suggested that pomegranate may increase the potency of certain drugs.

Older people may be more vulnerable, because they are more likely to be both taking medications and drinking more grapefruit juice. The body’s ability to cope with drugs also weakens with age, experts say.

Under normal circumstances, the drugs are metabolized in the gastrointestinal tract, and relatively little is absorbed, because an enzyme in the gut called CYP3A4 deactivates them. But grapefruit contains natural chemicals called furanocoumarins, that inhibit the enzyme, and without it the gut absorbs much more of a drug and blood levels rise dramatically.

by Roni Caryn Rabin, NY Times |  Read more:

Illustration: NY Times

Josef Felsinger (Austrian) -1908-1972

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Sheep sleep by Cathy Peng
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This Guy Could Be President

If you ever find yourself playing kickball in a New York City park on a pleasant Sunday afternoon—this is no recommendation that you do, kickball being the quintessence of hipster self-infantilization, but if you do find yourself in such a situation—and if, in the middle innings, a strange homeless-looking man appears and asks if he can take a turn at the plate, do not, as may be your temptation, shoo him away in anger and disgust. That man may be Bill Murray.

That we live in a universe in which such rules need stating is the great gift of Bill Murray's late-stage career. And it's what went down one brisk day this fall, when a group of twentysomethings playing kickball on Roosevelt Island were suddenly involved in the one-man flash mob that is a Bill Murray Sighting.

"We just figured he was someone's dad on the other team and kept playing, NBD," one of the participants wrote to Billmurraystory.com, a website devoted to chronicling such ubiquitous and predictably unpredictable events. "The man kicked the ball and ran pretty well to first base, trying to round to second, but one of my teammates chased him back to first, deciding not to attempt to peg the man. That was when everyone on my team realized who he was.... BILL MURRAY DECIDED TO PLAY KICKBALL WITH US!"

Murray made it as far as second base before getting doubled up on a line drive. He gave everybody on the field high fives. He hugged one player's mother, who was standing on the sidelines, lifting her high into the air. He posed for a group photo that would soon be all over the Internet. (All this, it should be said, after blowing off a GQ photo shoot.) And then he vanished.

It sometimes seems that making movies is merely Murray's hobby these days, secondary to these kinds of mystic, generous, Dadaist materializations. A pop-culture icon since his mid-twenties, he has emerged lately as something more bizarre and transcendent: a kind of wandering, perpetual performance artist, everywhere and nowhere, wherever the wind or spirit carries him: indie movies, golf tournaments, college frat parties, your karaoke booth right now. As one astute Internet commenter put it: "Some people photo-bomb pictures. Bill Murray photo-bombs life." That it's nearly impossible to tell the apocryphal sightings from the real ones may be precisely the point.

"I always laugh when people bitch about the subways. It's like, 'You have no idea,' " Murray says. It's a couple of hours after kickball, and still wearing the blue cutoff shorts and loose flannel shirt in which he played, he's ensconced in a hotel suite high above Manhattan. Murray is big, bigger than you expect, and his presence is bigger yet. He brings to even this, the most sterile of rooms, a kind of crackling kinetic energy, whether perched on the edge of the suite's round salmon-colored sofa or springing up to pour a cup of coffee from a silver tray. He's reminiscing about his early days in New York, part of a migration from The Second City in Chicago to The National Lampoon Radio Hour, which paved the way for Saturday Night Live.

"I got here in 1974, just as everything went to shit. Subways were insanely cold in the winter and insanely hot in the summer," he says. "The windows were all open, so you'd get metal filings and dust in your face. It was like being on a prison train, or working in a mine. I used to run all the time. I would get off that train and just start running."

Part of the joy of the city, of being Murray, was talking your way into places you weren't supposed to be. "You had to wheedle your way in those days. It was like, 'How do I get this experience?' So you go face-to-face with someone. You make eye contact," he says. "My brother and I crashed the Tommy premiere party in the subway, which was like the tightest ticket of whatever year... 1975? We had no business being at this thing, but we knew the guys in the kitchen. It was a party in the subway! People talk about it now, and it sounds like fiction." There's something beautiful about imagining Murray, semi-anonymous, before his adventures were instantly recorded.

"He was kind of scarier then," says producer and writer Mitch Glazer, who was introduced to Murray by John Belushi during Murray's first weeks on Saturday Night Live. "I didn't know him very well. He was blazingly funny. But he also seemed angrier."

This is the Murray of legend—punkish, confident, a modern incarnation of a line that stretches from Puck and Pan to Brer Rabbit and Groucho. (Or as Harold Ramis, his longtime, sometimes estranged collaborator and friend, once described it to me, "All the Marx Brothers rolled into one: He's got the wit of Groucho, the pantomimic brilliance and lasciviousness of Harpo, and the Everyman quality of Chico.") It's the Murray whose on-screen persona seems undivorceable from his exploits off. And it's the Murray frankly idolized by men who were a certain age when he was in his prime, men not overly blessed with good looks, wealth, or athletic prowess, for whom the actor seemed to have sprung forth, as surely as John Wayne, with an alternative blueprint for manhood: self-possessed, on the side of good, exquisitely capable of making one's way through the world. Several years ago, when I went to interview Ramis, he opened the door to his office, chuckled, and said something to the effect of "They always look like you." I imagine that Murray must feel the same way today; guys like me have been coming expectantly to see him for decades.

by Brett Martin, GQ |  Read more:

Photo: Peggy Sirota