What Kind of Father Am I

[ed. Reprinted for Father's Day.]

One evening—not long after my family moved to the old country farmhouse where my wife and I have lived for 45 years—our youngest son (my namesake, Jim, then three-year-old Jimmy) came into the woodshed, while I was there putting away some tools. “Look,” he said proudly, cradling in his arms the largest rat I had ever seen.

Instinctively, in what no doubt would be a genetic response of any parent, I tried to grab the rat from his arms before it bit him; but, as I reached toward it, the rat tightened its body, menacing me with its sharp teeth. At once, I stepped back: that, too, was an instinctive response, though rational thought immediately followed it. Was the rat rabid? Whether that was so or not, it was clear that the rat trusted Jimmy but not me, and yet it might bite both of us if I threatened it further.

“Where did you find it?” I asked my son.

“In the barn.”

“Which barn? The one with all the hay?”

“Yes.”

“It was just lying there, on the hay?”

“Yes, and he likes me.”

“I can see that it does.”

With the possible exception of the difference in our use of pronouns (which just now came to me without conscious intent; could it have risen from some submerged level of my memory?), that little dialogue isn’t an exact transcription—not only because it happened decades ago, but because while I was talking, my mind was elsewhere. I was looking at the garden tools I’d just returned to the wall behind Jimmy, thinking I might ask him to put the rat on the floor so that I could kill it with a whack of a shovel or some other implement. But my son trusted me, just as the rat apparently trusted him; and what kind of traumatic shock would I be visiting upon Jimmy if I smashed the skull of an animal he considered his friend?

The woodshed is in a wing of the house connected to the kitchen, where my wife, Jean, had been preparing dinner. She surprised me by coming quietly to my side; apparently she had overheard our conversation through the screen door and now was offering a solution to the dilemma. She said, “We need to find something to put your pet in, Jimmy.”

“A box,” I said. “Just keep holding it while I find one.” For I remembered at that moment a stout box I had seen while rummaging among all the agricultural items that had collected over the years in the carriage barn across the road—items that fell into disuse after the fields had been cleared, the house and barns constructed, and finally after tractors and cars had replaced horses. Amid the jumble of old harnesses, horse-drawn plow parts, scythes, and two-man saws was a small oblong box that might have contained dynamite fuses or explosives for removing stumps. It had been sawed and sanded from a plank about two inches thick. Like the house itself, it was made of wood far more durable than anything available since the virgin forests were harvested, and all of its edges were covered in metal. Though I felt guilty for leaving Jimmy and Jean with the rat, I was glad to have remembered the box I had admired for its craftsmanship, and I ran in search of it. For the longest time, I couldn’t find it and thought (as I often did later, whenever I found myself unable to resolve a crisis besetting one of our adolescent sons), What kind of father am I? I was close to panic before I finally found the box, more valuable to me at that moment than our recently purchased Greek-revival farmhouse—the kind of family home I’d long dreamed of owning.

A film of these events still runs through my mind, but I will summarize the rest of it here. Jimmy was initially the director of this movie, with Jean and me the actors obedient to his command: that is to say, he obstinately refused to put the rat into the box until a suitable bed was made for it—old rags wouldn’t do, for it had to be as soft as his favorite blanket. The rat gave him his authority, for it trusted Jean no more than it trusted me; it remained unperturbed in his embrace for a few minutes more, while Jean searched for and then cut several sections from a tattered blanket. Our son was satisfied with that bed, and the rat—whose trust in a three-year-old seemed infinite—seemed equally pleased, permitting Jimmy to place it on the soft strips. As soon as we put the lid on the box, I called the county health department, only to be told that the office had closed; I was to take in the rat first thing in the morning so that its brain could be dissected.

In response to Jean’s immediate question, “Did the rat bite you?” Jimmy said, “No, he kissed me.” Could any parent have believed an answer like that? My response was simply to put the box outside. Before giving our son a bath, we scrutinized every part of his body, finding no scratches anywhere on it. During the night the rat gnawed a hole through the wood, and by dawn it had disappeared.

Forty-odd years ago, rabies vaccination involved a lengthy series of shots, each of them painful, and occasionally the process itself was fatal. Neither the health department nor our pediatrician would tell us what to do. Once again we searched Jimmy’s body for the slightest scratch and again found nothing; so we decided to withhold the vaccination—though Jean and I slept poorly for several nights. Long after it had become apparent that our son had not contracted a fatal disease, I kept thinking—as I again do, in remembering the event—of the errors I had made, of what I should have done instead, of how helpless I had felt following my discovery that the rat had escaped.

While reading a recent biography of William James by Robert D. Richardson Jr., I found myself recalling those suspenseful and seemingly never-ending hours. As Richardson demonstrates, James was aware of the extent that circumstance and random events (like the one that led my young son to a particular rat so long ago) can alter the course of history as well as the lives of individuals, making the future unpredictable. James, like my favorite writer, Chekhov, was trained as a medical doctor and became an author—though not of stories and plays (his younger brother Henry was the fiction writer) but of books and articles on philosophical, psychological, and spiritual matters. One of the founders of American pragmatism, James rejected European reliance on Platonic absolutes or on religious and philosophical doctrines that declared the historical necessity of certain future events. Despite his realization that much lies beyond our present and future control, James still believed in the independence of individual will, a view essential to the long-lasting but often precarious freedom underlying our democratic system.

by James McConkey, The American Scholar |  Read more:
Photo: Julien Denoyer

‘The Water Fan’ (1898/99). Watercolour over graphite by Winslow Homer (1836–1910).
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Jeremy Price
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Is Forced Fatherhood Fair?

This weekend millions of Americans will happily celebrate the role that fathers play in their families. For some families, though — specifically those in which dad’s role was not freely assumed, but legally mandated — Father’s Day can be an emotionally complicated occasion. And that somewhat messy reality raises a question that is worth examining today as the very definition of parents and families continues to undergo legal and social transformation.

Women’s rights advocates have long struggled for motherhood to be a voluntary condition, and not one imposed by nature or culture. In places where women and girls have access to affordable and safe contraception and abortion services, and where there are programs to assist mothers in distress find foster or adoptive parents, voluntary motherhood is basically a reality. In many states, infant safe haven laws allow a birth mother to walk away from her newborn baby if she leaves it unharmed at a designated facility.

If a man accidentally conceives a child with a woman, and does not want to raise the child with her, what are his choices? Surprisingly, he has few options in the United States. He can urge her to seek an abortion, but ultimately that decision is hers to make. Should she decide to continue the pregnancy and raise the child, and should she or our government attempt to establish him as the legal father, he can be stuck with years of child support payments.

Do men now have less reproductive autonomy than women? Should men have more control over when and how they become parents, as many women now do?

The political philosopher Elizabeth Brake has argued that our policies should give men who accidentally impregnate a woman more options, and that feminists should oppose policies that make fatherhood compulsory. In a 2005 article in the Journal of Applied Philosophy she wrote, “if women’s partial responsibility for pregnancy does not obligate them to support a fetus, then men’s partial responsibility for pregnancy does not obligate them to support a resulting child.” At most, according to Brake, men should be responsible for helping with the medical expenses and other costs of a pregnancy for which they are partly responsible.

Few feminists, including Brake, would grant men the right to coerce a woman to have (or not to have) an abortion, because they recognize a woman’s right to control her own body. However, if a woman decides to give birth to a child without securing the biological father’s consent to raise a child with her, some scholars and policy makers question whether he should be assigned legal paternity.

by Laurie Shrage, NY Times |  Read more:

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The Real War on Reality

If there is one thing we can take away from the news of recent weeks it is this: the modern American surveillance state is not really the stuff of paranoid fantasies; it has arrived.

The revelations about the National Security Agency’s PRISM data collection program have raised awareness — and understandably, concern and fears — among American and those abroad, about the reach and power of secret intelligence gatherers operating behind the facades of government and business.

Surveillance and deception are not just fodder for the next “Matrix” movie, but a real sort of epistemic warfare.

But those revelations, captivating as they are, have been partial —they primarily focus on one government agency and on the surveillance end of intelligence work, purportedly done in the interest of national security. What has received less attention is the fact that most intelligence work today is not carried out by government agencies but by private intelligence firms and that much of that work involves another common aspect of intelligence work: deception. That is, it is involved not just with the concealment of reality, but with the manufacture of it. (...)

To get some perspective on the manipulative role that private intelligence agencies play in our society, it is worth examining information that has been revealed by some significant hacks in the past few years of previously secret data.

Important insight into the world these companies came from a 2010 hack by a group best known as LulzSec (at the time the group was called Internet Feds), which targeted the private intelligence firm HBGary Federal. That hack yielded 75,000 e-mails. It revealed, for example, that Bank of America approached the Department of Justice over concerns about information that WikiLeaks had about it. The Department of Justice in turn referred Bank of America to the lobbying firm Hunton and Willliams, which in turn connected the bank with a group of information security firms collectively known as Team Themis.

Team Themis (a group that included HBGary and the private intelligence and security firms Palantir Technologies, Berico Technologies and Endgame Systems) was effectively brought in to find a way to undermine the credibility of WikiLeaks and the journalist Glenn Greenwald (who recently broke the story of Edward Snowden’s leak of the N.S.A.’s Prism program), because of Greenwald’s support for WikiLeaks. Specifically, the plan called for actions to “sabotage or discredit the opposing organization” including a plan to submit fake documents and then call out the error. As for Greenwald, it was argued that he would cave “if pushed” because he would “choose professional preservation over cause.” That evidently wasn’t the case.

Team Themis also developed a proposal for the Chamber of Commerce to undermine the credibility of one of its critics, a group called Chamber Watch. The proposal called for first creating a “false document, perhaps highlighting periodical financial information,” giving it to a progressive group opposing the Chamber, and then subsequently exposing the document as a fake to “prove that U.S. Chamber Watch cannot be trusted with information and/or tell the truth.”

(A photocopy of the proposal can be found here.)

In addition, the group proposed creating a “fake insider persona” to infiltrate Chamber Watch. They would “create two fake insider personas, using one as leverage to discredit the other while confirming the legitimacy of the second.”

The hack also revealed evidence that Team Themis was developing a “persona management” system — a program, developed at the specific request of the United States Air Force, that allowed one user to control multiple online identities (“sock puppets”) for commenting in social media spaces, thus giving the appearance of grass roots support. The contract was eventually awarded to another private intelligence firm.

This may sound like nothing so much as a “Matrix”-like fantasy, but it is distinctly real, and resembles in some ways the employment of “Psyops” (psychological operations), which as most students of recent American history know, have been part of the nation’s military strategy for decades. The military’s “Unconventional Warfare Training Manual” defines Psyops as “planned operations to convey selected information and indicators to foreign audiences to influence their emotions, motives, objective reasoning, and ultimately the behavior of foreign governments, organizations, groups, and individuals.” In other words, it is sometimes more effective to deceive a population into a false reality than it is to impose its will with force or conventional weapons. Of course this could also apply to one’s own population if you chose to view it as an “enemy” whose “motives, reasoning, and behavior” needed to be controlled.

Psyops need not be conducted by nation states; they can be undertaken by anyone with the capabilities and the incentive to conduct them, and in the case of private intelligence contractors, there are both incentives (billions of dollars in contracts) and capabilities.

by Peter Ludlow, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Louie Psihoyos/Corbis

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Prêt à Travailler: Workaholic Holograms

A few months back, in a particularly long queue to get to the departure area at Logan International Airport in Boston, I noticed a number of people ahead of me taking out their cameras, laughing, and pointing at something I couldn’t yet see. Once I snaked my way up to that point in the line, I came face to face with a young, uniformed, dark-haired woman standing above a platform instructing me on how to sort my laptop and other items for security clearance. A few steps more, and I could see the demarcations of her perimeter. The woman was two-dimensional, a projection on a human-shaped glass sheet.

The holographic announcer I met is named Carla. She is a product by Tensator®, a “queue control and management solutions” brand. Installed in June of last year, an aviation trade publication reported she cost the airport only 26,000 dollars. The avatar runs 24 hours a day and is portable so she can be moved to other areas of the terminal. (...)

There’s a reason why one of the most memorable and chilling episodes of The Twilight Zone involved mannequins coming to life at night. It is the same reason why robots cause a feeling of revulsion when they appear increasingly representative in human likeness. But we don’t apply the uncanny valley hypothesis to photographic documentation of real people. Hardly anyone feels aversion to the life-size cardboard cut-outs of grinning employees that sometimes greet you in banks, pharmacies and post offices. Holographic announcers like Carla seem to fall somewhere in between. She may not reside in the uncanny valley, but for the time being, Carla’s presence among the living is definitely uncanny.

You will find similar holographic announcers or “airport virtual assistants” in Dubai, Washington Dulles, Macau, Istanbul Ataturk and Long Beach, among other locations. AirportOne™, a competitor of Tensator®, which deployed several models to airports in New York and New Jersey last summer, says its models are only prototypes. The next step will be to install more interactive virtual assistants, which might answer basic questions from travellers about things like flight times, gates or rental car locations. Their plan is to provide models with a touch-screen interface next to the avatar rather than Siri-style speech technology. Voice recognition, while available in the more expensive models (roughly 100,000 dollars) isn’t recommended for airports due to the likelihood of interference from background noise. But AirportOne™ thinks it will be possible by next year.

I spoke with Patrick Bienvenu, the Chief Operations Officer of Florida-based AirportOne™, who explained, “When you really have a message you want to get across, the avatar is a great way to get people’s attention. We’ve had a few people stop and say, ‘Oh, it’s freaky,’ but they get the message.” Bienvenu estimates that within five to ten years, people will get used to them, and by that time they will have more advanced technology and more advanced responsibilities. (...)

Musion is better known for their less practical work: reviving dead celebrity singers. Their most famous project was the digital resurrection of Tupac Shakur at last year’s Coachella Festival. The company also recreated Frank Sinatra to perform at Simon Cowell’s 50th birthday party. When the Gorillaz played the Grammys in 2006, Damon Albarn and the other musicians performed off stage, while Musion Eyeliner technology animated Jamie Hewlett’s cartoon characters. For a Burberry runway show in Shanghai, Musion mixed holograms with real models. The projections walked right through each other or froze in place before disappearing in clouds of snow and smoke.

Musion doesn’t shy away from the loaded word “resurrection” in the promotional material on its website. There it points out that “lost artists often increase in popularity after they pass so for holders of estates, the business potential is huge. However, more important is sharing amazing musicians with fans who’d expected never to see their idols again.” Immediately after the Tupac hologram, speculation began as to which performer might be resurrected next—Jim Morrison? Kurt Cobain? Jimi Hendrix? Surviving members of tlc are reportedly mulling over the possibility of a Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes hologram for a reunion tour.

by Joanne McNeil, domus | Read more:
Image: Joanne McNeil

Apple Thinks, and Makes, Different

Let the geeks, and we use the term endearingly, argue over the changes Apple Inc.announced this week to its mobile operating system. Our focus is on something more prosaic: an advertisement -- and what that ad says about the state of U.S. manufacturing.

Apple’s latest slick promotion touts the “Designed by Apple in California” line it includes on its devices (conveniently overlooking the second line, “Assembled in China”). At the end of the ad, a somber voice intones: “This is our signature. And it means everything.”

What it means is that Apple is feeling pressure from U.S. politicians and labor activists over the tiny number of domestic jobs it provides, compared with the huge workforce Apple supports offshore. The pressure was evident last month, when Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook, on the hot seat over the small amount of corporate tax Apple pays, reminded a Senate subcommittee that the company is investing $100 million to make some of its Macintosh computers in the U.S.

It’s not a huge amount of money for a company that earned $9.6 billion last quarter. Still, the operation, to be based in Texas, will be Apple’s first domestic assembly foray since 2004, and other technology manufacturers are moving jobs onshore. Google Inc.’s Motorola Mobility, for example, also plans to assemble smartphones in Texas.

It’s not all public relations: These companies are taking advantage of low energy costs and a decade of wage stagnation, which has made U.S. factory jobs more competitive with those in China, where wages are rising. Even China’s Lenovo Group Ltd. is starting to assemble notebook computers in North Carolina.

The insourcing movement has led to what some are calling an American manufacturing renaissance. This is an overstatement: Yes, manufacturing was responsible for the largest increase in economic value added (total output minus the value of intermediate products) in 2011 and 2012, according to the Labor Department. And since 2010, the U.S. has gained back some of the steep losses in manufacturing jobs. Yet the sector has lost 21,000 jobs since March. And the current employment of about 12 million people is a far cry from the peak of 17 million in 2000.

Getting back to that level will be tough, if not impossible. Apple’s Texas initiative might result in 200 new jobs, by some estimates. What’s more, the Apple, Lenovo and Motorola plants will only assemble devices, not build them from scratch. The components may even have to come from China, which pretty much controls the worldwide electronics supply chain.

by The Editors, Bloomberg |  Read more:

Image: Gilles Mingasson/Liaison via Getty Images

Leisure by the shore in Aigialo, Santorini
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Great Physicists on Currency

Americans sometimes complain that, unlike the currency of many other countries, which feature portraits of artists, scientists, and writers, U.S. dollar bills don’t tend to feature intellectuals. But one could, I think, make the case for Benjamin Franklin, who must certainly count as a man of letters, and did illustrate an important physics lesson when he flew that kite with a key on it. Still, that doesn’t exactly make him a physicist, as residents of Austria, New Zealand, Scotland, and Croatia, all of whom have used bills emblazoned with the faces of physicists, well know.

It does, however, get Franklin a place on University of Maryland physicist Edward F. Redish’s page “Physicists on the Money,” which was featured on Jason Kottke’s site yesterday. Redish highlights 24 bills bearing portraits of noted figures throughout the history of physics, including, at the top of the post, the Danish 500-kroner note that pictures quantum theorist Niels Bohr. Just above we have the universally recognizable dishevelment of Albert Einstein, who found his way onto Israel’s five-pound note by, among other achievements, coming up with the general theory of relativity. (...) Redish’s delightfully retro site also offers a collection of physicists on stamps, and links to a page with more scientist- and mathematician-bearing banknotes.

by Colin Marshall, Open Culture |  Read more:
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The Old Man at Burning Man

The land, the very atmosphere out there, is alien, malignant, the executioner of countless wagon trains. I am afraid to crack the window. Huge dervishes of alkaline dust reel and teeter past. The sun, a brittle parchment white, glowers as though we personally have done something to piss it off. An hour out here and already I could light an Ohio Blue Tip off the inside of my nostril. One would think we were pulling into this planet's nearest simulation of hell, but if this were hell, we would not be driving this very comfortable recreational vehicle. Nor would there be a trio of young and merry nudists capering at our front bumper, demanding that we step out of the vehicle and join them. These people are checkpoint officials, and it is their duty to press their nakedness to us in the traditional gesture of welcome to the Burning Man festival, here in Nevada's Black Rock Desert.

The checkpoint nudists are comely and embraceable, in the way that everyone ten years younger than me has lately begun to seem comely and embraceable—the women's dolphin smoothness still undefeated by time and gravity; the men bearing genial grins and penises with which I suppose I can cope: neither those lamentable acorns one pities at the gym, nor fearsome yardage that would be challenging to negotiate at close quarters. But here is the question: Do I want some naked strangers to get on me? Or, more to the point, do I want them to get on me with my father watching? This quandary is no quandary for my father. He is already out of the vehicle, standing in the coursing dust, smiling broadly, a stranger's bosom trembling at his chin.

My father and I are staid, abstracted East Coast types without much natural affinity for bohemian adventures. But we are here less for the festival itself than in service of an annual father-son ritual. Fourteen years ago, my father was diagnosed with an exotic lymphoma and given an outside prognosis of two years. When we both supposed he was dying, we made an adorable pledge—if he survived—to take a trip together every year. Thanks to medical science, we've now followed the tradition for a solid decade, journeying each summer to some arbitrarily selected far-flung destination: Greenland, Ecuador, Cyprus, etc. This year, we've retooled the concept and departed instead on a bit of domestic ethnography. We have joined the annual pilgrimage of many thousands who each year flee the square world for the Nevada desert to join what's supposed to be humanity's greatest countercultural folk festival/self-expression derby. Or it used to be, before people like my father and me started showing up.

Now I, too, am in the daylight, being hugged by a small, bearded Mr. Tumnus of a fellow, and also by a bespectacled lady-librarian type with a scrupulously mown vulva. "Welcome home," they murmur in my ear. "Home" this is decidedly not. Whether it is good to be here, we shall discover in the coming week. Still, I reply, "Uh, it's good to be home." (...)

When I mentioned to friends that I was going to Burning Man with my 69-year-old father, "Good idea" were the words out of no one's mouth. Perhaps this was a poor idea. Mere moments here and my emotional machinery, specifically the feelings-about-my-family manifold, is beginning to smoke, creak, and blow springs with a jaw-harp bwaaaang!

The root causes of my embarrassment, unsurprisingly, naturally, track back to my childhood, a montage of my father perpetually falling short of the dull, decorous Ward Cleaver ideal I imagined everyone else had for a dad. Because my father is constitutionally incapable of being embarrassed, I spent much of my early life being embarrassed on his behalf.

by Wells Tower, GQ | Read more:

Image: uncredited

annamariapotamiti Day 80- Variation 2- on Flickr.
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Robert Mapplethorpe, Two Glass Vases and One Flower - 1985.
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Joni Mitchell Interview

[ed. True genius.]

Troubled Waters

One chilly October morning, Beth Cheever hopped out of an aluminum boat. In rubber boots, a life jacket, and a knit hat pulled down over her ears, she walked the portage trail, beneath denuded alders and paper birches damp with the previous night’s rain, to the granite shoreline. She had never poisoned a lake before. Yet the thirty-two-year-old ecologist from New Hampshire had driven her Dodge Caravan twenty-two hours from Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario, to this corner of northwestern Ontario, just thirty minutes from the Manitoba border, with a plan to do just that. Spruces guarded the glassine pool’s edges like stoic sentries, and signs posted all around told wayward anglers to keep their lines out of the water. Lake 221 contained the beginnings of an experiment, a study of what could go wrong when the team laced an entire lake with antimicrobial compounds—deliberately, with the utmost precision.

Nanosilver kills microbial life, and, as the “nano-” in its name suggests, the antibacterial battle takes place in minutiae, each particle so small that a million of them could fit on the period at the end of this sentence. Nanoparticles have applications in technology, medicine, and agriculture. As Cheever’s post-doctoral supervisor, Maggie Xenopoulos, an aquatic biologist at Trent, said to me earlier, “They’re the future, and yet we have no idea if they’re affecting our environment.” In one laboratory study, scientists found cranio-facial deformities in minnows exposed as embryos to high concentrations for ninety-six hours. But lab studies only show so much; a beaker or bottle experiment does not necessarily reflect the complexities of an entire lake. If nanosilver killed off too many species or a key component in the web of life, the whole ecosystem might malfunction and collapse. To learn what happens in situ, Cheever’s team intended to spend two years sending an infinitesimal galaxy of particles into the lake.

Lake 221 lies within the bounds of the Experimental Lakes Area, a field site familiar to readers of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Limnology and Oceanography and theJournal of Plankton Research. Since 1968, fifty-eight freshwater basins contained by 200 square kilometres of granite and boreal forest have functioned as real-world test tubes, untouched by human hands except by scientific design. Lakes 226 and 227 demonstrated that phosphorus led to algal pollution, which convinced politicians to mandate the reformulation of detergents. Sulphuric acid caused a dramatic shift in species in Lake 223, bringing about international emissions limits to address acid rain. Long-term data has shown the lakes to be early warning sentinels for climate change. More recently, in an experiment on Lake 658, scientists demonstrated how mercury accumulated in fish; and on Lake 260, scientist Karen Kidd identified a single chemical, the synthetic estrogen in birth control pills, as the cause of mass feminization in male fish and a cataclysmic population crash. Anywhere else, such massive die-offs might have resulted from confounding factors: human activity, industrial effluent, or any number of synthetic organic compounds found in pharmaceuticals and personal care products. But the studies at the lake pinpointed cause and effect more decisively. They have drawn generations of scientists and students to the boreal shield, like pilgrims to the holy waters of ecological research. Cheever made her first pilgrimage in 2012. (...)

Six months earlier, on May 17, 2012, at 7:55 a.m., as Cheever’s colleagues headed out from the lab for a day in the field, the phone rang. Michelle Wheatley, regional director for the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, the Experimental Lakes Area’s federal overseer, called a mandatory emergency teleconference for the half-dozen full-time employees who happened to be at the field station that day (it employs seventeen staff in total). The government scientists dropped their packs and rain gear and gathered around a scratched wooden table inside the library of Hungry Hall. Wheatley told them the ELA would be closing within a year and their services would no longer be required. The meeting lasted forty-five minutes and ended with tears.

The department made no official announcement. In an apparent effort to avoid a paper trail, all communication about the closure took place verbally, over the phone or in face-to-face meetings. The shutdown had been precipitated by cuts proposed in Bill C-38, the Conservatives’ federal omnibus Budget Implementation Act. Buried within 400 pages of amendments and billions of dollars worth of cuts was a provision that effectively pulled the plug on the ELA’s $2 million in federal funding. In “affected” letters sent to federal employees to notify them that their positions might be eliminated, the department explained that the closure reflected “the government’s efforts to reduce the deficit, aimed to modernize government, to make it easier for Canadians to deal with government, and to right-size the costs of operations and program delivery.” The department’s research needs would be met by other facilities, wrote David Burden, the official who sent the letters. He did not specify which facilities; nor did he respond to a request for additional comment.

One scientist, who asked for anonymity after being instructed not to speak with the media without prior written consent, said, “People say these cuts were made at a high level outside of the department, which is likely true, but at some point they were offered up. People higher up would have no idea what the ELA is.” The source wondered if the motivation could be political: “The bulk of the cuts to scientific research programs come in the Prairie and Arctic regions, which have the most industrial development; the new Ring of Fire, the oil sands, huge industrial projects. It doesn’t quite add up.” (...)

The Experimental Lakes were formed nearly 10,000 years ago, on the shallow eastern shore of Lake Agassiz, a vast, irregular basin that once covered the middle of the continent. As the glacial waters receded, they left Lake Winnipeg and the Lake of the Woods; and the Red River Valley, which drains the broad, flat plains northward into Hudson Bay. Eons later, in 1887, far beyond what would have been the river’s southernmost banks, at a scientific meeting in Peoria, Illinois, an entomologist named Stephen Forbes became one of the first naturalists in North America to give a semi-coherent account of a living laboratory. A lake, he wrote, “forms a little world within itself—a microcosm within which all the elemental forces are at work and the play of life goes on in full, but on so small a scale as to bring it easily within the mental grasp.” The idea of lakes’ reflecting the outside world and being tethered to it foreshadowed the discipline of ecology, the study of relationships between things both living and not. Stephen Carpenter, the Stephen Alfred Forbes Professor of Zoology at the University of Wisconsin, explains the discipline’s many challenges this way: “Ecology is not rocket science,” he writes. “It is far more difficult.” To build a rocket entails a certain technical prowess and a society’s worth of resources. To understand an ecosystem requires a patience and persistence similar to that of raising a child: both are autonomous beings, evolving, adapting—and actively not doing what you want.

by Peter Andrey Smith, The Walrus | Read more:
Illustration by Marco Cibola

Dragon Ladies

My grandmother died last November at ninety-six. I hadn’t seen her in thirteen years. The funeral was in Switzerland, where she’d lived for decades, and I went only because my mother asked me to. Twice.

My mother was nervous. She doesn’t like public-speaking in general, and I imagine the emotional stakes of this situation were high. She had had a complicated relationship with her mother. Standing in the chilly chapel, she turned to me and whispered, “I don’t think I’m going to make it.”

“You’ll be fine,” I said. “Just remember what an asshole she was.”

My grandmother, the writer Han Suyin, was born Mathilde Rosalie Claire Elizabeth Genevieve Chou in China in 1916 to a Belgian mother and a Chinese father, which makes her, genetically, my closest match in my extended family, though until her death and funeral, I had chosen not to think too carefully about what we share. I’m the daughter of a full-Chinese mother (adopted by my grandmother) and a Russian Jew. Ori-Yenta, my father used to call me. When I was born, my grandmother told my mother that it was lucky I was a girl, the implication being that mixed-race girls had it better than mixed-race boys. They may have had it better, but they didn’t have it very good. Certainly, she hadn’t had it easy. A younger sibling had died because no doctor, white or Asian, would touch the infant, and my grandmother’s own mother — who, to her credit, did touch her — nevertheless referred to her as “the yellowish object.” With that row to hoe, the yellowish object became a Eurasian force of nature, a woman who was fierce and charismatic, as well as chameleonlike and a master at control and getting what she wanted. “I do what I want,” she said in one interview. “That’s the leitmotiv of my life.” My father, even to her face, called her Dragon Lady. (...)

No wonder I’ve preferred not to think too much about what my grandmother and I share, but listening to all those eulogies, and spending three days with my mother in a tiny Swiss hotel room, I had to. She was Eurasian; I’m Eurasian. She was a writer; I’m a writer. In one of her memoirs, published when I was twelve, she writes, “Karen is so very much like me in some ways that it is almost unbelievable.” What could she possibly have observed in pre-teen me to allow her to make that claim? Since her death, it’s occurred to me that those aspects of a mixed-race identity — her protean nature, her desire to control information and the narratives made from it — that served her have served me, and may have enabled the least appealing parts of ourselves. Turns out it’s not just my grandmother who deserves my ambivalence.

Those who have been disenchanted with me over the years, reading this, might say: Dragon Lady. A woman with chameleonlike abilities. A master at getting what she wants. A control freak. Now who does that sound like? (...)

When my mother returns to the chair next to mine in that Swiss chapel, having just barely made it through her eulogy without falling apart, it is that moment in my grandmother’s book I think about. I whisper “Good job” to my mother the way I might to a pre-schooler, but that is all I offer. Why did I so often not offer what was clearly needed? Why is it that I have to imagine so many of the stories that matter so much to my mother? Because I have chosen not to ask. Me, the person who’s known even to passing strangers as the person who will ask anyone anything.

I was there in 1972 when my mother searched for her “real” mother and in 2012 when my mother lost the only mother she’d known. Her need was, and is, clear.

Some sort of nurturing or supportive presence: that’s what she was asking for when she asked me to come to the funeral. It was what she meant when before her eulogy she turned to me to say she wasn’t going to make it. It was what she was asking for the night after the funeral when, in a loud, busy café, she insisted on telling, in full, narratives from her life, a life that I already knew. Here, she was saying, I’m giving you something my mother could not give me: the stories we’ve shared to the best of my memory, to the best of my knowledge. And what had I given her back? Measured responses. Controlled reactions. The bare minimum. And who did that sound like?

I’ll come to the funeral, but I’ll only stay three days. I’ll tell you you’ll be fine giving the eulogy, but make a flippant comment that ignores your real panic. I know those stories, I’ll say not unkindly.

What could my grandmother have seen in a twelve-year-old me that made her say we were unbelievably alike? What is the single most important way in which my grandmother and I are alike? Our treatment of my mother. This is behavior I’m ashamed of, but I haven’t stopped. And if I’m being even more honest, I have to say that our mixed-race heritage may have more to do with that than I’d like to admit.

by Karen Shepard, The Millions |  Read more:

Image: courtesy Karen Shepard

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