[ed. My nephew modeling for Armani. I think he's done in Milan now, Paris up next. What an interesting life.]
Tuesday, June 25, 2013
Fashion Week Spring 2014
[ed. My nephew modeling for Armani. I think he's done in Milan now, Paris up next. What an interesting life.]
Monday, June 24, 2013
Privacy and the Threat to the Self
In the wake of continuing revelations of government spying programs and the recent Supreme Court ruling on DNA collection – both of which push the generally accepted boundaries against state intrusion on the person — the issue of privacy is foremost on the public mind. The frequent mantra, heard from both media commentators and government officials, is that we face a “trade-off” between safety and convenience on one hand and privacy on the other. We just need, we are told, to find the right balance.
This way of framing the issue makes sense if you understand privacy solely as a political or legal concept. And its political importance is certainly part of what makes privacy so important: what is private is what is yours alone to control, without interference from others or the state. But the concept of privacy also matters for another, deeper reason. It is intimately connected to what it is to be an autonomous person.
What makes your thoughts your thoughts? One answer is that you have what philosophers sometimes call “privileged access” to them. This means at least two things. First, you access them in a way I can’t. Even if I could walk a mile in your shoes, I can’t know what you feel in the same way you can: you see it from the inside so to speak. Second, you can, at least sometimes, control what I know about your thoughts. You can hide your true feelings from me, or let me have the key to your heart.
The idea that the mind is essentially private is a central element of the Cartesian concept of the self — a concept that has been largely abandoned, for a variety of reasons. Descartes not only held that my thoughts were private, he took them to be transparent — all thoughts were conscious. Freud cured us of that. Descartes also thought that the only way to account for my special access to my thoughts was to take thoughts to be made out of a different sort of stuff than my body — to take our minds, in short, to be non-physical, distinct from the brain. Contemporary neuroscience and psychology have convinced many of us otherwise.
But while Descartes’s overall view has been rightly rejected, there is something profoundly right about the connection between privacy and the self, something that recent events should cause us to appreciate. What is right about it, in my view, is that to be an autonomous person is to be capable of having privileged access (in the two senses defined above) to information about your psychological profile — your hopes, dreams, beliefs and fears. A capacity for privacy is a necessary condition of autonomous personhood.
To get a sense of what I mean, imagine that I could telepathically read all your conscious and unconscious thoughts and feelings — I could know about them in as much detail as you know about them yourself — and further, that you could not, in any way, control my access. You don’t, in other words, share your thoughts with me; I take them. The power I would have over you would of course be immense. Not only could you not hide from me, I would know instantly a great amount about how the outside world affects you, what scares you, what makes you act in the ways you do. And that means I could not only know what you think, I could to a large extent control what you do.
That is the political worry about the loss of privacy: it threatens a loss of freedom. And the worry, of course, is not merely theoretical. Targeted ad programs, like Google’s, which track your Internet searches for the purpose of sending you ads that reflect your interests can create deeply complex psychological profiles — especially when one conducts searches for emotional or personal advice information: Am I gay? What is terrorism? What is atheism? If the government or some entity should request the identity of the person making these searches for national security purposes, we’d be on the way to having a real-world version of our thought experiment.
But the loss of privacy doesn’t just threaten political freedom. Return for a moment to our thought experiment where I telepathically know all your thoughts whether you like it or not From my perspective, the perspective of the knower — your existence as a distinct person would begin to shrink. Our relationship would be so lopsided that there might cease to be, at least to me, anything subjective about you. As I learn what reactions you will have to stimuli, why you do what you do, you will become like any other object to be manipulated. You would be, as we say, dehumanized.
This way of framing the issue makes sense if you understand privacy solely as a political or legal concept. And its political importance is certainly part of what makes privacy so important: what is private is what is yours alone to control, without interference from others or the state. But the concept of privacy also matters for another, deeper reason. It is intimately connected to what it is to be an autonomous person.What makes your thoughts your thoughts? One answer is that you have what philosophers sometimes call “privileged access” to them. This means at least two things. First, you access them in a way I can’t. Even if I could walk a mile in your shoes, I can’t know what you feel in the same way you can: you see it from the inside so to speak. Second, you can, at least sometimes, control what I know about your thoughts. You can hide your true feelings from me, or let me have the key to your heart.
The idea that the mind is essentially private is a central element of the Cartesian concept of the self — a concept that has been largely abandoned, for a variety of reasons. Descartes not only held that my thoughts were private, he took them to be transparent — all thoughts were conscious. Freud cured us of that. Descartes also thought that the only way to account for my special access to my thoughts was to take thoughts to be made out of a different sort of stuff than my body — to take our minds, in short, to be non-physical, distinct from the brain. Contemporary neuroscience and psychology have convinced many of us otherwise.
But while Descartes’s overall view has been rightly rejected, there is something profoundly right about the connection between privacy and the self, something that recent events should cause us to appreciate. What is right about it, in my view, is that to be an autonomous person is to be capable of having privileged access (in the two senses defined above) to information about your psychological profile — your hopes, dreams, beliefs and fears. A capacity for privacy is a necessary condition of autonomous personhood.
To get a sense of what I mean, imagine that I could telepathically read all your conscious and unconscious thoughts and feelings — I could know about them in as much detail as you know about them yourself — and further, that you could not, in any way, control my access. You don’t, in other words, share your thoughts with me; I take them. The power I would have over you would of course be immense. Not only could you not hide from me, I would know instantly a great amount about how the outside world affects you, what scares you, what makes you act in the ways you do. And that means I could not only know what you think, I could to a large extent control what you do.
That is the political worry about the loss of privacy: it threatens a loss of freedom. And the worry, of course, is not merely theoretical. Targeted ad programs, like Google’s, which track your Internet searches for the purpose of sending you ads that reflect your interests can create deeply complex psychological profiles — especially when one conducts searches for emotional or personal advice information: Am I gay? What is terrorism? What is atheism? If the government or some entity should request the identity of the person making these searches for national security purposes, we’d be on the way to having a real-world version of our thought experiment.
But the loss of privacy doesn’t just threaten political freedom. Return for a moment to our thought experiment where I telepathically know all your thoughts whether you like it or not From my perspective, the perspective of the knower — your existence as a distinct person would begin to shrink. Our relationship would be so lopsided that there might cease to be, at least to me, anything subjective about you. As I learn what reactions you will have to stimuli, why you do what you do, you will become like any other object to be manipulated. You would be, as we say, dehumanized.
by Michael P. Lynch, NY Times | Read more:
Image via:
Deeda Blair’s Elegance of Conviction
In researching my last book, “Far From the Tree,” I became close to Harry and Laura Slatkin, whose work on behalf of people with autism — co-founding a charter school, establishing the Center for Autism and the Developing Brain — has set a new standard for parent activism. When I asked Laura how she came to such a vision for medical crusading, she gave credit to Deeda Blair. Four years ago, the Slatkins invited my husband and me to dinner with their muse. Deeda mixes austerity with intimacy, and at that first dinner, I found her both aloof and engaging; she seemed to offer only an impression of herself, but to see the rest of us more boldly than we’d intended. Several accomplished scientists were in the klatch that evening, and Deeda asked questions with her characteristic quiet intensity, as though she were conducting discreet but critical interviews on behalf of the Nobel committee. Her style is at once embracing and exclusive, as though it excluded most of the world but not you, whoever you might be on this particular evening.
Deeda was hardly brought up to be an activist. She grew up in Chicago, went to the Academy of the Sacred Heart for Girls to be educated and made her debut in 1949. She attended a two-year junior college, and lived a vigorously social life, traveling widely. Soon after her disastrous first marriage ended, she met her true love, William McCormick Blair Jr., at Eunice and Sargent Shriver’s house. Bill was a partner at a law firm with Adlai Stevenson at the time, and was a Kennedy intimate; Eunice was the chaperone through their courtship. Shortly after Bill was appointed Kennedy’s ambassador to Denmark, Deeda married him at Frederiksborg Castle. Bill was later Johnson’s ambassador to the Philippines. Deeda brought tremendous style to her ambassadorial posts; WWD called her “a peacock among the wrens.”
In the meanwhile, Bill had introduced her to the medical philanthropist Mary Lasker, who helped build up the National Institutes of Health and led the War on Cancer. Deeda told me that at Sacred Heart, she had worn “the world’s ugliest uniform” and had not been allowed to study biology, and she reacted against the first problem with couture and against the second with Mary Lasker. She and Lasker were soon the best of friends, summering together in the South of France at Villa Fiorentina. Lasker had a gift for leading people with power to those who could conceptualize medical quandaries; she would have Greta Garbo and Princess Grace to dinner with Michael DeBakey (the distinguished heart surgeon) or James Watson (the co-discoverer of the structure of DNA). Lasker saw that Deeda could carry that tradition forward. In 1965, Deeda became vice president of the Albert and Mary Lasker Foundation.
Lasker was on the National Cancer Advisory Board, so Deeda focused initially on cancer research. She met the scientists, asked them questions, read their papers. When she visited New York, she would stay with Lasker, who would introduce her to more physicians. “Mary asked a great friend, David Karnofsky, at Memorial Sloan-Kettering, to take me on,” Deeda recalled. “And that was the most extraordinary learning experience — whether it was rounds, whether it was lectures, whether he was showing me how to dissect chicken embryos and look for liver damage. He made me feel that there was a role for a layperson.” Soon enough, Deeda was on the Breast Cancer Task Force treatment committee, where she was the only woman. She also served for 12 years on the board of the American Cancer Society, where she was on the research committee. She began going to jury meetings for the Lasker Awards, the most prestigious medical prize in the United States. She was a voracious learner.
Soon oncologists were talking about the sudden uptick in a previously exotic cancer called Kaposi’s sarcoma, occurring mostly among gay men. Deeda was there for the initial meetings on the subject, which led her to be in the front lines of emerging AIDS research.
She joined the visiting committee at the Harvard School of Public Health and worked with the H.I.V. team there, which was led by Max Essex. “AIDS was the first time I ever really asked anyone for money,” Deeda said. “We needed to know how it was transmitted, and Max wanted to study that. And I asked Mary Lasker for $50,000. A couple of years later, I identified another foundation, asked them for lunch and behaved like the most appalling female. ‘You have been so generous, you’ve done this, you’ve done that. And I hate to ask you for one more thing.’ And I really did. I was so embarrassed that tears were going down my cheeks. I said, ‘We’ve got to have a laser cell sorter.’ And then I rattled off what a laser cell sorter was. And they said, ‘Deeda, stop. We will do everything in our power to get you your laser cell sorter.’ And they did it.”
Deeda soon established a trademark style. Who else would introduce Nobel laureates to Hubert de Givenchy? Who else would come home from the Paris couture shows with $267,000 for an automatic sequencer to identify African variants of H.I.V.? Daniel Romualdez, her Yale-educated architect and interior designer, said, “One cannot overestimate how much she has done for AIDS — she was among the first people of her stature deeply involved with fund-raising and working with researchers when people in society would not even mention the illness.” Essex once wrote that Deeda always had “an understanding of the whole interlocking process of getting things done … and sees one thing always — hope.”
by Andrew Soloman, NY Times Magazine | Read more:
Photograph by Julia Hetta
Open Waters
We knew that at the time we were somewhere south of the Maldives, five hundred miles or so away from the American military base on Diego Garcia, and we had the vague idea we might eventually reach one of the South African ports, perhaps Durban. We had no radio, nor much of a schedule. Drifting through the doldrums, we hoped for a breeze to fill our sails.
We were—or so we thought—miles away from any shipping lanes, and in consequence our seamanship had become slack. Though generally we had taken two-hour turns at watch, our laziness—coupled with the oppressive equatorial heat, the tedious slap of the waves against the hull, the occasional thwack of the sheets against the mast—led to a dangerous dawn ritual: whoever was on watch when the sun rose would set the sails and rudder and then join the other below, both of us sleeping until breakfast time. We told ourselves that the sea was quite empty. There was no danger whatsoever of being run down.
But one morning it happened that we both overslept. It was almost ten when I turned in my bunk, squinted at my watch—and then in terror rushed up to the cockpit. Four hours late, and without a single eye cast over the horizon: to any serious sailor this was quite wantonly irresponsible, beyond foolish. I was at first quite relieved: I stood at the yacht’s starboard side, gazing across at limitless expanse of gray ocean, happy to see that there was not a vessel of any size in sight, anywhere. But then I turned around. And, all of a sudden, on the port side of our boat, there simply was no horizon.
Instead, a huge wall of dark green steel rose high above me, blocking the view entirely. The steel was close enough for me to reach out and touch, which I did. I looked high up toward the sky, and the wall went on and on until there was an overhang, the wing of the great ship’s bridge, and there were men leaning over it, cheering and laughing. We were safe. All was fine, and shipshape.
But it well might not have been. She was a Japanese car-carrier, on passage between Yokohama and Rio de Janeiro, and she had been plowing a lonely southwesterly furrow across the ocean at a steady twenty knots, when the officer on watch noticed a tiny blip on his radar. He had called out on his VHF radio but heard nothing. He looked through his binoculars, finally seeing a small yacht, its sails flapping uselessly, rolling gently on the swell. There was no one on deck, no sign of humanity. Abandoned, he thought. He gave orders to the helmsman to change course so as to come alongside, then slow to just enough speed to allow for steering-way, and sidle up beside us. On our port side.
He was just preparing to send down a boarding party when he spotted me, newly wakened and now standing with blithe innocence with my back to him, looking out to starboard. He thought for a moment to sound his steam horn but figured I’d have an instant heart attack. He knew I’d be surprised enough when I turned around.
The next fifteen minutes were devoted to the kind of camaraderie you seem only to find out in midocean, where the dangers and risks of the peacetime sea equalize everyone, bend all to a common purpose. They found ropes and lowered to us food and drink (a frozen leg of lamb, bags of strawberries, bottles of Asahi Super Dry), charts (ours had blown overboard some days before) and (for my traveling partner) some kind of shampoo that lathers up in seawater. And then they made preparations to leave. Before spooling up their engines, however, the captain, a stern Japanese officer of some years, leaned over: “Be more careful,” he said, with some solemnity. “Don’t take the sea for granted.”
He then shouted down the coordinates of exactly where we were and signaled that he would push gently away from us, using only a feather touch from his bow thruster. Once there was ten feet of water between our two hulls, we could hear him call down for slow ahead both, and there came a shudder in the sea, and from the stern a huge froth of white water boiled up, and his vessel began to slide away. The white water then began to boil up ever more furiously, the commands grew steadily fainter, the ship—which we could now see whole for the first time—began to shrink away in our field of view until within no more than ten minutes it had quite vanished: there was just a smudge of smoke on the western sky, a steel-flat horizon, and the sea all around us—port, and starboard too, this time—was quite empty once again.
It was then that I vowed to get to know my charts, and to learn how best to navigate. To take the Japanese captain seriously, in other words. My companion was well up to the task—she had already sailed singlehanded all the way up from Australia—and she happily agreed to teach me the rudiments: how to use the sextant, how to sight the sun at noon, how to calculate the hour angle and read the sight-reduction tables, how to tell Betelgeuse from Aldebaran and Rigel and make them work for me, nudging me toward finding my place out here on the high seas.
Once trained, I was to be given no help. She agreed still to stand watches, to make sure I did not put our seven-ton sailing vessel directly in the way of a two-hundred thousand-ton supertanker. But otherwise she would leave me alone—to find and swing the sun, to calculate and estimate and compute and draw on the charts those lines that began as wide-spaced triangles—the cocked hats of many a midshipman’s early attempts—but which day by day edged closer and closer until they intersected in a neatly drawn point and I could answer with some precision, I hoped, her inevitable question.
Which came after a week of steady westward sailing. Just where are we?
The sea around us on that hot tropic afternoon was empty, once again. It had been so for all of the previous seven days. But now I ventured a suggestion. I said that I believed that at about two a.m. we would see a lighthouse, fine on our port bow. It would flash twice every ten seconds. It would be on the island of Mauritius.
At a little after two in the morning we did indeed spot the flashing light, in the Mauritian capital of Port Louis. And we did open at least one bottle of Dom Perignon for breakfast to celebrate. By using only glass and brass and a series of otherwise incomprehensible numbers, it turned out that I, ingénue extraordinaire, had managed to bring a boat across a thousand miles of trackless sea, and had persuaded it to find its destination with precision of geography and timing, just as a million mariners, from Pytheas and Hanno onward, had done before me. I had become conjoined with the navigators’ community, and colorblind or not, I could now claim, at least on one level, to now know the sea and her ways.
And for many years following, this is what I fully believed. I would wander ceaselessly about on the world’s oceans, in a variety of boats, in all weathers and seasons and climates. I sailed the Drake Passage in a vicious August gale. I passed south through the Sunda Strait, with ash from Anak Krakatau raining down on our craft. I slunk north through the Bering Strait in an icebreaker, dodging bergs under a blanket of thick fog. I went twice on passage to Pitcairn Island in the middle of the Pacific nowhere, and managed almost to founder our boat in search of whirlpools south of the Lofoten islands, off Norway.
Every sea, every year, every season, every latitude. And yet steadily, as I wandered ever more distantly, the inevitable happened. The early conceit of knowledge began to fade; new, unimagined mysteries began to scrape away the veneers on the surfaces of received truths, and over the years I slowly came to an entirely new acceptance—one that I now know is common to all who are properly fascinated by and respectful of the sea: that what we know of her, in truth, is just about nothing. To think otherwise is truly quite preposterous.
by Simon Winchester, Lapham's Quarterly | Read more:
Image: Man holding up a model of sixteenth-century ship, 1934 (Australian National Maritime Museum)
Edible QR Codes Educate Diners on Seafood
[ed. Great. More picture-taking and phone surfing in restaurants. Will smartphones eventually be just another eating utensil, integral to the complete dining experience? Perhaps they already are.]
Restaurants are finding creative ways to let customers know about where their food is coming from as consumers’ interest in the origins of their foods continues to increase.One chef has even begun to label sushi served at his restaurants with QR codes that give customers that information.
“It’s proven in the food world in general that when your customers know about the products you’re giving them they will pay more for them and come back more often,” said Robert Ruiz, chef of two-unit Harney Sushi in San Diego and Oceanside, Calif. “The technology and the information’s here, so why don’t we do the right thing and make money while we’re doing it?”
Ruiz uses edible ink to print the QR codes on rice wafers he serves with sushi. Customers with smartphones can follow the codes to a website that describes the origins of the fish they’re eating.
Ruiz learned the technique from a local pastry chef who uses edible ink to print images on wedding cakes.
The code currently takes customers to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s FishWatch website, which lets users look up the fish they’re eating and see the health of the fishery it comes from.
by Bret Thorn, Restaurant News | Read more:
Image: uncredited
Sunday, June 23, 2013
The Real People
In San Cristóbal de las Casas, on a street whose name I’ve forgotten, a dog bit my ankle. I kicked the mongrel in the teeth. He yelped, and a sharp voice called him away. I peeled down my sock. Not much blood, but the skin was broken in three places.
I raced back to the garden guesthouse where I lived, high up on the hill. I showed Gabriel the wound and told him the dog’s owner had no vaccination papers. Promises, but no proof. A scientist and my host, Gabriel stretched the skin with his right hand while little Isabella tugged the fingers of his left. It was almost time for comida and the kids were clutching their bellies in mock starvation.
“It’s not very deep,” he said. “Wash it with soap and water.”
In the bathroom, I picked off jagged crumbles of soap with my thumbnail and jammed them into the small holes.
The table was laden with tamales, salad, and agua de Jamaica, but I couldn’t eat. Before leaving the States, I’d received three rabies boosters and a warning I’d need more if I was bitten. I said, “Shouldn’t I see a doctor?”
Gabriel served himself. “If you want.”
The children got boisterous and shared a joke with their father. I thirsted down several glasses of the magenta agua as if it were medicine. Bright sun shone off the clay tiles and steeped the table the color of dark tea. The wood was probably mahogany, harvested from deep in the jungle. Since I started my job as a tour guide at the Lacandon culture museum several months ago, I’d wanted to go to the jungle. People said it was a place that swallowed you and burst green over your head. The lakes were pure and sun warmed. The Lacandons, supposedly the closest living descendents of the ancient Mayans, rarely engaged with the modern world.
I couldn’t stay quiet. I didn’t understand why Gabriel wasn’t worried, too. “Do you think they have the shots at the hospital?”
He kissed his daughter on the head. He said if I was concerned I could go to the hospital in Tuxtla, the state capital, two hours over the mountains. “The bus is very cheap.”
That night I went to the bar, El Cocodrilo, where they played “Black Magic Woman” three times in an hour. I ached for Fernando. In the months when we were together, we ordered another tequila every time the song came on, even if the last round was still full. Fernando hated Santana. I’d never heard of him, though I recognized the song.
There were a lot of things I’d never heard of. I was 17 and had graduated high school early to come here, to grow up a little, as I’d told my parents, who’d paid for my flight and helped me find a host family. Fernando was a Mexican-American with a heart-shaped face who’d just finished a master’s in teaching. He was spending the summer joyriding around his father’s country in a brown sweater. Tonight I was desperate to tell him about the dog. I wasn’t in pain, but I was scared.
But five days ago, Fernando’s fiancée had arrived.
I sipped tequila and tried to forget, and soon people I knew arrived: Stuart, the pale, skinny Englishman; Manuel, the Spanish museum director; and Zelda from Amsterdam who wore blue mascara. Stuart ordered drinks all around until two tequila shots and a Negro Modelo stared up at me.
“Like a fish, my young friend,” Stuart said, leaning into me.
Stuart was a friend of Gloria and Gabriel. They’d introduced him as “someone your own age,” though Stuart was 35, a teacher in the local schools. He’d taken me on a motorcycle tour of the San Cristóbal countryside. In the afternoons, he played piano in the museum courtyard. I told Stuart about the dog. “What should I do?”
“You told Gabriel, yeah? He’ll take care of you.” He looked at me with moony eyes, head too large for his frame. “Let’s dance,” he said.
Fernando didn’t like to dance; Stuart was smooth and easy on the floor. He mentored me on how I should move my body. “Not so stiff in the hips. You’re all shoulders. Open up more. Here.” Tonight, as on other nights, he linked an orangutan arm around my waist and guided me. “Easy, easy,” he said. “Let me do it.”
The faster numbers I danced with Zelda. We threw our arms around, whiplashing our necks, and laughed, baring teeth.
“I have to get rabies shots!” I said over the music.
“I never want to leave this place!” she shouted back.
Zelda and Manuel had just come back from the jungle. On their trips, the museum staff paid the Lacandon artists for the their handicrafts sold at the gift shop and oversaw the construction of casas de cultura, Manuel’s pet project. The casas were, as far as I could tell from the pictures passed around over lunch, simple wooden structures with a roof and dirt floor, open on all sides. Fat splintery posts supported the ceiling and displayed black-and-white photographs taken more than fifty years ago by the museum’s dead founder. The idea was to provide images of the community’s history in a public space. Lacandon youth could see their ancestors performing now-forgotten ceremonies. In the old pictures, the long-haired Lacandons wore cloth T-shirts down to their knees, walked barefoot, and carried curved machetes. As I said in my twice-daily tours, they called themselves the Hach Winik, the Real People.
Yet most of the people in the color photos documenting the jungle trips were museum staff. When I asked Zelda if the Lacandons themselves visited the casas, she said, “Of course. Why wouldn’t they?” I guess I thought they’d have better things to do, their own dramas to live. Kids wouldn’t be impressed by some backward-looking gringos hanging up pictures of their grandparents. Still, I was desperate to get to the jungle. When Manuel had invited Zelda on this last trip, I asked if I could go along, but he’d said there was no room. I could go on the next one. But I’d heard that before. When the lists of invitees were drawn up, nobody ever thought of me. On the dance floor maybe, but not for the jungle.
I raced back to the garden guesthouse where I lived, high up on the hill. I showed Gabriel the wound and told him the dog’s owner had no vaccination papers. Promises, but no proof. A scientist and my host, Gabriel stretched the skin with his right hand while little Isabella tugged the fingers of his left. It was almost time for comida and the kids were clutching their bellies in mock starvation. “It’s not very deep,” he said. “Wash it with soap and water.”
In the bathroom, I picked off jagged crumbles of soap with my thumbnail and jammed them into the small holes.
The table was laden with tamales, salad, and agua de Jamaica, but I couldn’t eat. Before leaving the States, I’d received three rabies boosters and a warning I’d need more if I was bitten. I said, “Shouldn’t I see a doctor?”
Gabriel served himself. “If you want.”
The children got boisterous and shared a joke with their father. I thirsted down several glasses of the magenta agua as if it were medicine. Bright sun shone off the clay tiles and steeped the table the color of dark tea. The wood was probably mahogany, harvested from deep in the jungle. Since I started my job as a tour guide at the Lacandon culture museum several months ago, I’d wanted to go to the jungle. People said it was a place that swallowed you and burst green over your head. The lakes were pure and sun warmed. The Lacandons, supposedly the closest living descendents of the ancient Mayans, rarely engaged with the modern world.
I couldn’t stay quiet. I didn’t understand why Gabriel wasn’t worried, too. “Do you think they have the shots at the hospital?”
He kissed his daughter on the head. He said if I was concerned I could go to the hospital in Tuxtla, the state capital, two hours over the mountains. “The bus is very cheap.”
That night I went to the bar, El Cocodrilo, where they played “Black Magic Woman” three times in an hour. I ached for Fernando. In the months when we were together, we ordered another tequila every time the song came on, even if the last round was still full. Fernando hated Santana. I’d never heard of him, though I recognized the song.
There were a lot of things I’d never heard of. I was 17 and had graduated high school early to come here, to grow up a little, as I’d told my parents, who’d paid for my flight and helped me find a host family. Fernando was a Mexican-American with a heart-shaped face who’d just finished a master’s in teaching. He was spending the summer joyriding around his father’s country in a brown sweater. Tonight I was desperate to tell him about the dog. I wasn’t in pain, but I was scared.
But five days ago, Fernando’s fiancée had arrived.
I sipped tequila and tried to forget, and soon people I knew arrived: Stuart, the pale, skinny Englishman; Manuel, the Spanish museum director; and Zelda from Amsterdam who wore blue mascara. Stuart ordered drinks all around until two tequila shots and a Negro Modelo stared up at me.
“Like a fish, my young friend,” Stuart said, leaning into me.
Stuart was a friend of Gloria and Gabriel. They’d introduced him as “someone your own age,” though Stuart was 35, a teacher in the local schools. He’d taken me on a motorcycle tour of the San Cristóbal countryside. In the afternoons, he played piano in the museum courtyard. I told Stuart about the dog. “What should I do?”
“You told Gabriel, yeah? He’ll take care of you.” He looked at me with moony eyes, head too large for his frame. “Let’s dance,” he said.
Fernando didn’t like to dance; Stuart was smooth and easy on the floor. He mentored me on how I should move my body. “Not so stiff in the hips. You’re all shoulders. Open up more. Here.” Tonight, as on other nights, he linked an orangutan arm around my waist and guided me. “Easy, easy,” he said. “Let me do it.”
The faster numbers I danced with Zelda. We threw our arms around, whiplashing our necks, and laughed, baring teeth.
“I have to get rabies shots!” I said over the music.
“I never want to leave this place!” she shouted back.
Zelda and Manuel had just come back from the jungle. On their trips, the museum staff paid the Lacandon artists for the their handicrafts sold at the gift shop and oversaw the construction of casas de cultura, Manuel’s pet project. The casas were, as far as I could tell from the pictures passed around over lunch, simple wooden structures with a roof and dirt floor, open on all sides. Fat splintery posts supported the ceiling and displayed black-and-white photographs taken more than fifty years ago by the museum’s dead founder. The idea was to provide images of the community’s history in a public space. Lacandon youth could see their ancestors performing now-forgotten ceremonies. In the old pictures, the long-haired Lacandons wore cloth T-shirts down to their knees, walked barefoot, and carried curved machetes. As I said in my twice-daily tours, they called themselves the Hach Winik, the Real People.
Yet most of the people in the color photos documenting the jungle trips were museum staff. When I asked Zelda if the Lacandons themselves visited the casas, she said, “Of course. Why wouldn’t they?” I guess I thought they’d have better things to do, their own dramas to live. Kids wouldn’t be impressed by some backward-looking gringos hanging up pictures of their grandparents. Still, I was desperate to get to the jungle. When Manuel had invited Zelda on this last trip, I asked if I could go along, but he’d said there was no room. I could go on the next one. But I’d heard that before. When the lists of invitees were drawn up, nobody ever thought of me. On the dance floor maybe, but not for the jungle.
by Jennifer Acker, N+1 | Read more:
Image: Photo by caliopedreams via Flickr.
For Solazyme, a Side Trip on the Way to Clean Fuel
Starting when they became friends in freshman year at Emory University in Atlanta, Jonathan S. Wolfson and Harrison F. Dillon would take off into the mountains of Wyoming and Colorado for weeks at time. They spent their days hiking in the wilderness and their nights drinking bourbon by the campfire, talking big about how one day they would build a company that would help preserve the environment they both loved.
They graduated, and the backpacking trips grew shorter and further between. Mr. Dillon went on to earn a Ph.D. in genetics and a law degree, and ended up working as a biotech patent lawyer in Silicon Valley. Mr. Wolfson received law and business degrees from New York University and eventually started a software business. But the two still got together every year. And they kept talking about the company that, they imagined as time went on, would use biotechnology to create renewable energy.
“These were delusional rantings of kids,” said Mr. Wolfson, who, like Mr. Dillon, is now 42.
Then Mr. Dillon found microalgae, and delusional became real. Microalgae, a large and diverse group of single-celled plants, produce a variety of substances, including oils, and are thought to be responsible for most of the fossilized oil deposits in the earth. These, it seemed, were micro-organisms with potential. With prodding, they could be re-engineered to make fuel.
So in 2003, Mr. Wolfson packed up and moved from New York to Palo Alto, Calif., where Mr. Dillon lived. They started a company called Solazyme. In mythical Valley tradition, they worked in Mr. Dillon’s garage, growing algae in test tubes. And they found a small knot of investors attracted by the prospect of compressing a multimillion-year process into a matter of days.
Now, a decade later, they have released into the marketplace their very first algae-derived oil produced at a commercial scale. Yet the destination for this oil — pale, odorless and dispensed from a small matte-gold bottle with an eyedropper — is not gas tanks, but the faces of women worried about their aging skin.
Sold under the brand name Algenist, the product, costing $79 for a one-ounce bottle, would seem to have nothing in common with oil refineries and transportation fuel. But along with other niche products that the company can sell at a premium, it may be just the thing that lets Solazyme coast past the point where so many other clean-tech companies have run out of gas: the so-called Valley of Death, where young businesses stall trying to shift to commercial-scale production. (...)
“The problem with a lot of clean-tech deals is that they have been about the way you make things in high volume or in production, which means you can’t prove out the ideas unless you build factories and actually make things in volume,” said Andrew S. Rappaport, a venture capitalist who is a board member of Alta Devices, a solar film start-up.
That company is one of a handful that, like Solazyme, is pursuing niche markets for its core product, in its instance developing fast-charging cases for smartphones and tablets, until it can produce low-cost, commercial quantities of solar materials for homes and businesses. A Bay Area start-up called Amyris, meanwhile, has shifted its genetically engineered yeast toward chemicals and cosmetic ingredients as it tries to build a biofuel business.
by Diane Cardwell, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Jim Wilson
They graduated, and the backpacking trips grew shorter and further between. Mr. Dillon went on to earn a Ph.D. in genetics and a law degree, and ended up working as a biotech patent lawyer in Silicon Valley. Mr. Wolfson received law and business degrees from New York University and eventually started a software business. But the two still got together every year. And they kept talking about the company that, they imagined as time went on, would use biotechnology to create renewable energy.“These were delusional rantings of kids,” said Mr. Wolfson, who, like Mr. Dillon, is now 42.
Then Mr. Dillon found microalgae, and delusional became real. Microalgae, a large and diverse group of single-celled plants, produce a variety of substances, including oils, and are thought to be responsible for most of the fossilized oil deposits in the earth. These, it seemed, were micro-organisms with potential. With prodding, they could be re-engineered to make fuel.
So in 2003, Mr. Wolfson packed up and moved from New York to Palo Alto, Calif., where Mr. Dillon lived. They started a company called Solazyme. In mythical Valley tradition, they worked in Mr. Dillon’s garage, growing algae in test tubes. And they found a small knot of investors attracted by the prospect of compressing a multimillion-year process into a matter of days.
Now, a decade later, they have released into the marketplace their very first algae-derived oil produced at a commercial scale. Yet the destination for this oil — pale, odorless and dispensed from a small matte-gold bottle with an eyedropper — is not gas tanks, but the faces of women worried about their aging skin.
Sold under the brand name Algenist, the product, costing $79 for a one-ounce bottle, would seem to have nothing in common with oil refineries and transportation fuel. But along with other niche products that the company can sell at a premium, it may be just the thing that lets Solazyme coast past the point where so many other clean-tech companies have run out of gas: the so-called Valley of Death, where young businesses stall trying to shift to commercial-scale production. (...)
“The problem with a lot of clean-tech deals is that they have been about the way you make things in high volume or in production, which means you can’t prove out the ideas unless you build factories and actually make things in volume,” said Andrew S. Rappaport, a venture capitalist who is a board member of Alta Devices, a solar film start-up.
That company is one of a handful that, like Solazyme, is pursuing niche markets for its core product, in its instance developing fast-charging cases for smartphones and tablets, until it can produce low-cost, commercial quantities of solar materials for homes and businesses. A Bay Area start-up called Amyris, meanwhile, has shifted its genetically engineered yeast toward chemicals and cosmetic ingredients as it tries to build a biofuel business.
by Diane Cardwell, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Jim Wilson
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