The Breakup

I am home in the Midwestern city where I was born, and I am not entirely certain how I got here. I know that I have taken a lot of trips in the last year, to two continents and three countries, over and across the United States a handful of times by air and once by car. I know that my pockets are filled with bar coded baggage tags, and that I never have the clothes I need for the right seasons. I am rarely dressed for the occasion at the best of times, but lately I have been looking stranger than usual, hoping a smile and a pair of earrings can compensate for living out of a suitcase. 

I am not exactly sure why I am here, but like a lot of things I have done this year, I suspect it has something to do with a boy. Twelve months ago, the idea of uprooting myself for that reason seemed unfeminist and absurd to me. Back then I was working long hours and eating Goya beans every night for dinner with produce retrieved from dumpsters by a fregan acquaintance who was spending some months on my couch. Cutting the mold off a block of cheese, he would ask incredulously, "How can you eat something straight out of the can?" The Squatter, as I affectionately called him, also advocated following your heart. I had never before considered my heart to be a particularly reliable compass, and following it is not the marketable experiment that a year spent following Oprah or the Bible is, but nothing else was working for me so I decided to give it a try.

I had lost my bearings and two consecutive Metrocards during a period when a lot of things in my life were turning over. I'd moved from a two-story house I shared with my boyfriend to a basement apartment with three roommates and a number of mice. I thought of the former house as the place where I had learned to cook soups and invest in quality tights. It was easier to eulogize it that way, rather than as the first place where I made someone important to me cry, and then learned to look away, in a way that seemed like self-preservation but was in lieu of having to change, a callous made thick from gardening instead of just buying gloves or learning to hold the spade right.

Once settled in my new apartment, I began the process of something many people I know have done in reverse: New York was breaking for me and so I decided that I was in love with someone far away. The super of our building was ejected from his nearby home over marital issues, so he began converting the laundry room off our kitchen into an apartment for himself. Bugs crawled through the new incisions he made in the walls. It seemed like the city sanitation department never recovered from holiday weekends, the trash mounting in lolling piles around lampposts. I had developed a difficult relationship with the man at the laundromat, and when I walked to the bodega at night, a guy on the corner had started saying things like, "I would do anything to touch your legs." I loved my neighborhood anyway, the sudden jolt from the smell of dried fish in cardboard boxes at Nostrand Avenue produce stores, or Saturdays sprawled in Prospect Park's islands of shade. But sometime last summer I thought I might be able, for a while at least, to love this boy more than I loved the city. For a while I did.

by Lucy Morris, This Recording |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

McDonalds’ Suggested Budget for Employees

McDonald’s has partnered with Visa to make a website dedicated to showing its employees how to properly budget their meager peasant salaries. However, what it actually does is illustrate the fact that it is nearly impossible to get by on minimum wage, as shown in this “example” budget chart:

Yeah– now, when I first saw that, I assumed that the top line was for a part-time McDonald’s employee. Then I got out my calculator– that is actually what you would make if you were working full-time at McDonald’s. 1,105 dollars a month.

Now let’s say that the “second” job that they budget in here (feels like cheating, but OK) is also minimum wage. That would mean you were working about 62 hours a week, on average. Oh, wait. That’s if they live in Illinois where the minimum wage is $8.25. The national minimum wage is $7.25. That translates to 74 hours a week. That’s almost a whole other full time job.

And what do you get for working 74 hours a week? Well, you don’t get heat, clearly. There’s a big ol’ zero next to the heat in that chart. In my building– we have separate checks for gas and electric– that would mean that not only do you not get to heat and cool your home, but also that you do not get to heat your water, or cook on your stove, if you have a gas stove (I do).

Also noticeably absent in this budget? Food. And gas. There’s a line for a car payment, but not for gas. Which is suspect, because if you’re working two jobs it’s possible you will pay more for your gas than you’d be paying for your car.

Also… health insurance for $20 a month? There is really no such thing as health insurance for $20 a month if you’re buying your health insurance on your own. I think the least amount is going to be about $215 a month– and that only covers hospital emergencies.

The minimum wage in this country is reprehensible. If the minimum wage had kept up with inflation it would be over $10 an hour. If it had kept up with productivity? It would be $21.72.

by Robyn Pennacchia, Death and Taxes | Read more:
Image: uncredited

Ross Dickinson: Valley Farms (1934)
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Figura Afligida, Eduardo Kingman. Ecuadorian (1913 - 1998)
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"Dune" Endures

As the temperature in California’s Death Valley climbed toward a hundred and thirty degrees recently, I had a vision of giant sandworms erupting from the desert floor and swallowing up the tourists and news media gathered around the thermometer at the National Park Service ranger station. The worms I had in mind sprang first from the imagination of Frank Herbert, and they have, over the past half century, burrowed their way into the heads of anyone who has read his science-fiction classic, “Dune.” Set on a desert planet named Arrakis that is the sole source of the universe’s most valued substance, “Dune” is an epic of political betrayal, ecological brinkmanship, and messianic deliverance. It won science fiction’s highest awards—the Hugo and the Nebula—and went on to sell more than twelve million copies during Herbert’s lifetime. As recently as last year, it was named the top science-fiction novel of all time in a Wired reader’s poll.

As David Itzkoff noted in 2006, what’s curious about “Dune” ’s stature is that it has not penetrated popular culture in the way that “The Lord of the Rings” and “Star Wars” have. There are no “Dune” conventions. Catchphrases from the book have not entered the language. Nevertheless, the novel has produced a cottage industry of sequels, prequels, and spin-offs, the production of which only accelerated after Herbert’s death in 1986. There are now eighteen novels in the “Dune” chronicles, not to mention screen adaptations, comic books, and countless board, video, and role-play games. The conversion of “Dune” into a franchise, while pleasing readers and earning royalties for the Herbert estate, has gone a long way toward obscuring the power of the original novel. (I gave up after the fourth installment, “God Emperor of Dune.”) With daily reminders of the intensifying effects of global warming, the spectre of a worldwide water shortage, and continued political upheaval in the oil-rich Middle East, it is possible that “Dune” is even more relevant now than when it was first published. If you haven’t read it lately, it’s worth a return visit. If you’ve never read it, you should find time to. (...)

Perhaps one explanation for “Dune” ’s lack of true fandom among science-fiction fans is the absence from its pages of two staples of the genre: robots and computers. This is not an oversight on Herbert’s part but, rather, a clever authorial decision. Centuries before the events described in the novel, humans revolted and destroyed all thinking machines. “The god of machine-logic was overthrown,” Herbert writes in an appendix, “and a new concept was raised: ‘Man may not be replaced.’ ” This watershed moment, known as the Butlerian Jihad, resulted in a spiritual awakening, which put into place the religious structures that ultimately produce the messiah, Paul Atreides. There is no Internet in Herbert’s universe, no WikiLeaks, no cyber war. This de-emphasis on technology throws the focus back on people. It also allows for the presence of a religious mysticism uncommon in science fiction. It’s a future that some readers may find preferable to our own gadget-obsessed present.

by Jon Michaud, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Daigo Daikoku, a designer with Nippon Design Center, has won a Yellow Pencil at the 2012 D&AD Awards for “100 Graphics of Anatomy Chart” (人体百図), the catalogue for a series of works made for a solo exhibition at Leta Gallery. Each work consisting of the word for a part of the body and visuals inspired by that word.

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Gary A. Bib
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Haul Videos: Postcards from the End of the World?

So, haul videos are a thing. If you’re interested in secondhand clothing and/or you spend much time on YouTube, you may already know this. I didn’t know about haul videos for a long time, though, despite the fact that I qualify in both categories. I first saw one last year when I had a research job that required me to transcribe an incredible number of media posted to the internet. We were allowed to work with user-uploaded videos on any topic, so since clothing is kind of my thing I looked for videos about that. My searches turned up many thousands of Outfit ofthe Day videos (save yourself some trouble and just type OOTD), which was another neat discovery. So many young women—and the occasional older woman, and the occasional man—standing in their bedrooms, modeling, maybe, the new jeans they matched with a tunic top and describing how they planned to wear the outfit to school, or work, or on a picnic that is also a first date. I’ve also seen a surprising number of instructional videos in which a woman shows the different ways to fold a scarf: into turbans that collect loose hair on the top of the head, hijab to cover the hair and sometimes face, shawls for the shoulders, or that jaunty, fluffy sort of cravate that I’ve never been able to pull off without looking like my own grandmom.

I can’t truthfully say that there was a single one of these videos that I didn’t enjoy looking at. Besides the fact that I find other people’s outfit choices to be a good source of ideas for my own ever-shifting “look,” there’s something really beautiful about the existence of these videos. Actually I find all of YouTube touching that way. Something about the simple, I don’t know, faith that goes into believing that the nice little things you do are not only worth doing, but are also worth talking about or even helping other people learn to do. It’s amazing the things we can come together over: skateboarding down railings, blowing up bottles of soda with Mentos, performing that rude Cee Lo Green song in American Sign Language. There’s just so much to do.

But there is this other category of videos about clothing, and it’s called “hauls.” In a haul video, a person sits in front of her camera and holds up every piece of clothing she bought that day and describes where she got each item and how much she paid. Some of the hauls are collected on a day of shopping at regular stores—places where the stuff is new—and I tend to find those less interesting and actually a little distressing, considering how much new clothing can cost. It’s the hauls from a day of thrift store shopping (nope, still not using the word thrift as a verb) that get me excited. (...)

I’ll grant you, it is a weird, late-capitalist phenomenon. We don’t get to see the purchased thing being used, even, we just learn about the purchasing itself. If shopping—spending—has become a hobby, then haul videos are ... what? Digital fanzines? Skill-sharing workshops? Postcards from the end of the world? Nah, I don’t know. I think it’s just human. Telling someone what you did today is important, and if you don’t have enough people in your life then tumblr and Twitter and YouTube are there for you, and while it might be easy to denigrate that kind of internet behavior as socially stunted I think it’s pretty lucky that we have those ways of reaching out. My high school best friend was an eccentric girl named Sara, and she’s the one who taught me how to dress cool for cheap. One day after a few hours at the nearby Salvation Army stores (and Hole in her tape deck, and some awkward attempts at smoking cigarettes in her car) we went back to my house. I sort of blasted through the front door like the jerk that I was but coming in behind me, Sara said quietly, “Do you want to show your mom the stuff we got?” Sara’s mom died young, when she and I were still teenagers. I wasn’t in the habit of showing my mother the clothing I’d found—she doesn’t care about that stuff, not the way Sara’s mom did—and I remember not especially wanting to, at first, but after a moment thinking it was a really good idea.

by Katie Haegele, Utne Reader | Read more:
Image by Freaktography, licensed under Creative Commons

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Sleeping cat netsuke by Kai Gyokusai, Japan. Mid to late 19th century.

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On Watch, Eilif Peterssen (Norwegian, 1852-1928)

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An Infantile Disorder

In Japan in the early 1990s, a young psychiatrist named Saitō Tamaki began seeing patients with a cluster of strange symptoms. Actually, he barely saw them at all; more often than not, other family members would approach him about a brother or a son who was afflicted with an unfamiliar state. Mostly men on the threshold of adulthood, they were retreating to their rooms, shrinking from all social contact or communication, and closing off into themselves, often for periods of a year or more. Not wanting to kill themselves but unable to live in society, these youths folded inward in an attempt to fit themselves away. Saitō began calling them hikikomori sainen, “withdrawn young men,” and in 1998 published a book with his findings called Shakaiteki hikikomori—Owaranai Shishunki, or Social Withdrawal—Adolescence Without End.

Saitō ventured a count: There were 1 million people in a state of withdrawal or hikikomori, about one percent of the Japanese population. Eighty percent of them were men; 90 percent were over 18. “Social withdrawal is not some sort of ‘fad’ that will just fade away,” Saitō wrote. It is “a symptom, not the name of an illness,” and “there has been no sign that the number of cases will decrease.” His book became a best seller in weeks. Hikikomori joined otaku (a person with obsessive interests) and karoshi (death from overwork) as a loan word in English to describe a new social phenomenon that at first appeared uniquely Japanese. A few American authors have picked up on it as an enigmatic or convenient trope (in books like Shutting Out the Sun: How Japan Created Its Own Lost Generation by Michael Zielenziger and Hikikomori and the Rental Sister by Jeff Backhaus, most recently). But only now has Saitō’s original work been translated, by Jeffrey Angles, published by University of Minnesota Press in March.

Culturally bound psychological phenomena always fascinate the press because they excite the categories of racism through a veneer of scientificity. But Saitō was explicit on this point: Though his patients’ ­symptoms all emerged in some way through the Japanese social order, there was nothing intrinsically Japanese about the phenomenon. In fact, he had coined the term hikikomori to translate work that an American psychologist had done on similar cases of acute social withdrawal and later joined it up with the sociological category of NEETs (not in education, employment, or training) in Britain. His internationalism slyly made room for an astonishing claim: The structure of age itself was beginning to break down. Japan might have been early to the trend, but it was an effect of the market, not any particular culture.

Age is the most generic attribute a person can have, but each age is also irreducibly personal. Every 35-year-old has been 16, but no one has ever been 16 in exactly the same way. No surprise: The experience is deeply striated by gender, race, and class, and then again by the most intimate hazards of family history and endocrinology. Even so, maturation feels so natural it’s hard to think about the work that it takes or that it could go any other way. But how you feel old is a historically recent development, embedded so close to our core we take it as synonymous with our selves.

The global spread of the teenager shows this. When the Sphinx had Oedipus solve the riddle of aging on his way to establishing the neurotic family, there were only three ages you could be in life: a child, adult, or old. But by the time the post-1945 social order was in place, the teenager stood apart, ready at hand to the market. Without a household of their own, they would consume and be thrown in or out of work as the business cycle demanded it. The unique teenage consciousness that accompanied this economic development gives away the tight integration of age in the structures that govern our lives and teach us how to understand ourselves. Being a teenager is not about how old you are. Age is a social form attuned to the market. And though it’s unevenly distributed, it operates super­nationally.

Still, Saitō was curious. With touching excitement about the new possibilities opened up by the Internet (this was back in the late 1990s), he contacted colleagues abroad to see if they were seeing the same thing. Koreans wrote back: Yes, they said, and their compulsory military service had no effect on the spread of hikikomori. One French respondent wrote, No, his society would never produce withdrawal like that; another anonymously replied that it absolutely did but that in France, these people become homeless, not homebound. Jeffrey Angles chimes in too. In the translator’s note to the American edition, he shares the story of a student of his who went through a period of hikikomori, dropping out of high school in his senior year. With therapy he was later able to pull himself back into society and to college, but without a name for his experience, he had no explanation for what made him lose that time. A Thai psychiatrist wondered, “What do people in withdrawal do about their living expenses?” It was a reasonable question. Saitō found that their parents cover them.

Saitō’s book was otherwise modest in scope. It aimed to establish a working definition of the condition and provide practical steps for worried parents to follow. Without pathologizing withdrawn teens, Saitō suggested that the parents were equally implicated through their relationship with their child in what he called the “hikikomori system,” a self-reinforcing state of disconnection between child, family, and society. “As the individual takes shelter from the social body, it holds both the individual and the family in its grasp,” he says. But even though elective solitary confinement seems like it must stem from extreme trauma if not psychosis, Saitō insists that there is no mental illness involved. Instead, he links it to our “era of adolescence” and concludes that “‘social withdrawal’ is the pathology that best symbolizes our moment in time.”

At base, the problem is one of mounting surplus populations. This is not the eugenicist fever dream of overpopulation but a concept that Karl Marx developed alongside a critique of Thomas Malthus. Essentially, since the working day can only be extended so far, increases in productivity happen only through labor-saving innovation. Extended across time and populations, this means fewer and fewer people must be employed to make a profit. More and more people become not only unnecessary but an impediment to fleet, low-cost production. Like excess inventory, their labor power cannot be sold, so it must be written off or destroyed.

by Max Fox, TNI |  Read more:

Image: Galia Offri

Pond at the Benten Shrine in Shiba, Kawase Hasui (Japanese, 1883-1957)

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Alice in Chains

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Operation Easter

On the afternoon of May 31, 2011, Charlie Everitt, an investigator for the National Wildlife Crime Unit in Edinburgh, Scotland, received an urgent call from a colleague in the Northern Constabulary, the regional police department whose jurisdiction includes the islands off the country’s western coast. The officer told Everitt that a nature-reserve warden on the Isle of Rum, twenty miles offshore, had reported seeing a man “dancing about” in a gull colony. Everitt looked at the clock. It was 4 p.m., too late to catch the last ferry, so he drove halfway to Mallaig, a tiny port town four hours away, where he could take the first boat out in the morning.

The Isle of Rum, a forty-one-square-mile rock, is inhabited by about forty people, many of them employed by the Scottish Natural Heritage, an environmental organization charged with protecting wildlife. Rum has red deer and an assortment of rare birds, including merlins and white-tailed sea eagles, and it is a principal breeding ground for the Manx shearwater, a seabird with a distinctly eerie call. For this reason, as Everitt knew, the place was also a target for egg collectors, a secretive network of men obsessed with accumulating and cataloguing the eggs of rare birds. (...)

At the turn of the twentieth century, as the conservation movement began raising awareness of endangered species, the collecting of wild-bird eggs came under scrutiny. In 1922 in London, Earl Buxton, addressing the annual meeting of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, warned of the “distinct menace” posed by egg-collecting members of the British Ornithologists’ Union, of which Lord Rothschild was a member. Indignant, Rothschild split off and, with the Reverend Francis Charles Robert Jourdain, a cantankerous Oxford-educated ornithologist who bore a scar across his forehead from falling off a cliff in search of an eagle’s nest, formed the British Oological Association. The group, which renamed itself the Jourdain Society after Jourdain died, in 1940, proclaimed that it was the only organization in the country dedicated to egg collecting.

It has not fared well. In 1954, the Protection of Birds Act outlawed the taking of most wild-bird eggs in the U.K. In 1981, some ninety species were declared Schedule 1; possession of their eggs, unless they were taken before 1954, is a crime. Meetings of the Jourdain Society, to which members wore formal attire and carried display cabinets full of eggs, became the target of spectacular raids and stings. By the nineteen-nineties, more than half of Jourdain Society members had egg-collecting convictions, according to the R.S.P.B. One member recently agreed to a radio interview only after insuring that his voice would be disguised.

“An awful lot of the ornithological knowledge we hold dear is based on the work of both professional and amateur naturalists over the course of the last two hundred years, and that involved significant amounts of collecting,” Russell said, as we passed an aisle with Jourdain’s eggs. “But today’s collectors are not what I would call ornithologists. These are obsessives who have chosen eggs as a particularly attractive thing. The suspect part of the attraction is that you’re not allowed to do it.” (...)

Despite Britain’s fervor for wildlife preservation, it has no central government agency like the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. In terms of fighting wildlife crime, its closest equivalent, the National Wildlife Crime Unit, created in 2006, has only eight full-time employees. Both the public and law enforcement rely on the R.S.P.B. investigative team to help prevent bird crimes.

Egg-collecting cases make up about twenty-five per cent of the team’s work, but egg collecting is the only wildlife crime that warrants an ongoing nationwide police initiative, called Operation Easter. The program, which Shorrock helped launch in 1997, has enabled the R.S.P.B. to combine decades’ worth of intelligence on egg collectors into a national police database. “It’s very rare in the U.K. to have a national police operation of this kind,” Alan Stewart, the police officer who started Operation Easter with Shorrock, told me. “The others are for drug trafficking, human trafficking, and football hooliganism.”

It had been a busy season for the investigators. Aside from the bust in Suffolk, the R.S.P.B. was guarding a red-backed-shrike nest in the South of England twenty-four hours a day. Two pairs of shrikes appeared in 2010, the first time the species had been seen nesting in the U.K. since the mid-nineteen-eighties; many blamed its disappearance on egg collectors. When word of their reappearance got out, dozens of people volunteered to protect the nests. “With all the crimes I’ve dealt with, egg collecting is always the one that upsets the public the most,” Shorrock, a former Manchester cop, told me.

On the table next to him was an embossed photo album titled “Egg Collectors and Their Associates.” Under one photograph of a group of men around a picnic table, someone had written, “Who are these guys?” Most egg collectors don’t seem interested in selling or even trading eggs, only in possessing them. “They’re not normal criminals,” Shorrock said. Thomas estimated that there were about fifty active collectors left. “We know who they are,” he added.

Between them, Thomas and Shorrock had been inside many of the collectors’ homes, some of them several times. It was like one big family, almost. Daniel Lingham, whose home contained thirty-six hundred eggs, broke into tears when Thomas and the police arrived in 2004. “Thank God you’ve come,” he said. “I can’t stop.”

by Julia Rubinstein, New Yorker |  Read more:

Photo: Richard Barnes

From Coast to Toast

Earlier this summer, on what passed for a clear morning in Los Angeles, Tom Ford, director of marine programs at the Santa Monica Bay Restoration Foundation, went to the Santa Monica Municipal Airport to catch a ride up the Pacific coast in a Beechcraft Bonanza G36. (Clad in a plaid shirt and chinos, he seemed not to be related to the designer.) “What a totally sweet glass cockpit,” he told the pilot, who was donating this flight through LightHawk, a nonprofit group dedicated to helping environmentalists document problems from the air. As Santa Monica drifted by below, its famous boardwalk and Ferris wheel appearing as though they were little pieces on a game board, the minuscule Bonanza headed toward the great blue ocean, which was gently undulating like a fresh duvet being fluffed on a bed. (...)

Suddenly, Malibu’s big beach-erosion calamity whipped into view. Broad Beach is about one mile long, with 114 homes built right up against the Pacific. These homes have always been owned by the biggest of Hollywood’s big names. Jack Lemmon, Steve McQueen, and Frank Sinatra (who liked to sit on the beach in his fedora) once lived here. Sinatra’s widow, Barbara, does still. Current residents include Steven Spielberg, Dustin Hoffman, Pierce Brosnan, Danny DeVito, Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell, Michael Ovitz, Sidney Sheinberg, and Patrick Soon-Shiong, the doctor who developed the cancer drug Abraxane and is L.A.’s richest man.

Over the past decade, Broad Beach residents estimate, they’ve lost up to 60 feet of their beach. This day, it wasn’t even high tide, and for the most part the waves lapped at a huge, 13-foot-high wall of rocks. The tiny bit of sand that Ford could spy between rock and ocean was dark gray; it had been wet recently and would soon be again. You couldn’t put a towel down without soaking your derrière. “I don’t call it Broad Beach anymore,” says Bill Patzert, a climatologist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, in Pasadena. “I call it Invisible Beach.” (...)

Nantucket, a disappearing spit of land deposited by melting glaciers 30 miles south of Cape Cod eons ago, has, like Malibu, long been a summer playground of the rich and famous. With its whale oil, Nantucket was once the uncontested Silicon Valley of its day, the supplier of light to America. Nowadays, Chris Matthews and David Gregory are seasonal residents, as is the 102-year-old Bunny Mellon (Matthews’s neighbor). There is a sprinkling of writers too: the late David Halberstam summered on the island, as now do Daniel Yergin, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Prize and The Quest, and columnist Russell Baker. (Vanity Fair contributing editor William D. Cohan, one of the authors of this piece, owns a home at 81 Baxter Road, just two doors south of the former Bluff House.)

In the early 2000s, as real-estate prices on the island shot into the stratosphere, rising as much as 20 percent a year, the summer people were increasingly made up of bankers, hedge-fund moguls, and industrialists, such as Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google; Roger Penske, the rental-truck and auto-racing magnate; David Rubenstein, one of the co-founders of the Carlyle Group; Bob Diamond, the former C.E.O. of Barclays P.L.C.; Lou Gerstner, the former C.E.O. of IBM; and Bob Greenhill, the Wall Street mogul. The late Mark Madoff, son of Bernie, used to summer on Nantucket. Current homeowners on Sconset Bluff include the extended family of fabled investor George Soros (they have three homes on the east side of Baxter Road); Amos Hostetter, one of the founders of Continental Cablevision; Jimmy Haslam, the owner of the N.F.L.’s Cleveland Browns and the C.E.O. of the Pilot Flying J truck-stop chain; and Norwood Davis, the retired chairman of Trigon Healthcare. Farther south on Baxter Road, where the erosion problems are less acute due to tidal flows and the curve of the land, lives Brian Simmons, the managing partner of the Chicago buyout firm Code Hennessy & Simmons. Michael Berman, the co-founder of George magazine, and his wife, interior designer Victoria Hagan, just built a new home off the bluff, across the street from Haslam and Davis, on Sankaty Head Road.

With such wealth and power concentrated among the homeowners along Baxter Road and in other areas with vulnerable shoreline elsewhere on the island, you’d think they could solve the erosion problem, but so far they have proved no match for Mother Nature and her fierce mission to reclaim the history-rich island for the Atlantic Ocean. A number of oceanfront homes in Madaket, at the southwestern corner of the island, look like Easter Island moais sticking out of the sand.

The burning question among island residents—one that pits the determined, deep-pocketed summer people against the working folks who live here year-round and occupy most of the positions in local government—is whether the politicians will finally allow the homeowners to spend their own money to save their multi-million-dollar homes with the stupendous views. So far, the answer has been a resounding no. Sarah Oktay, the managing director of the University of Massachusetts’s Nantucket Field Station and the influential vice-chairman of the island’s powerful Conservation Commission, which generally must approve any projects to stave off erosion, has been the principal thorn in the side of the rich homeowners. She is a pugnacious, determined, and articulate advocate for letting nature take its course. While she agrees measures can be taken to slow erosion, she argues, “Rarely can you stop it, and if you do stop it, you’re hurting someone else. It’s a natural process.”

by By William D. Cohan and Vanessa Grigoriadis, Vanity Fair | Read more:
Images: Mark Holtzman (left); George Riethof (right)

[ed. Traveling and wi-fi connections are likely to be hit or miss.]

James Corner from "Taking Measures Across The American Landscape"
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