Through the Nanoscope: A Nobel Prize Gallery

This year’s Nobel Prize for Chemistry was awarded to three researchers who developed ways to capture images of living cells at nanoscale resolution — well below the 200 nanometres thought to be the best possible resolution for visible-light microscopes. (...)

A fourth recently-developed super-resolution technique, called structured illumination microscopy (SIM), illuminates samples with stripes of light. A computer program analyses the interference patterns formed by the stripes (usually combining composite pictures with stripes in different orientations) to reconstruct a picture of a cell at about double the resolution limit of optical microscopy. This SIM image shows a three-dimensional view of a human bone cancer cell with actin in purple, DNA in blue, and mitochondria in yellow.

by Richard Van Noorden, Nature | Read more:
Image: Dylan Burnette/NIH/Courtesy of Nikon Small World

Eugène Alain Séguy. Plate No. 7 from Papillons. Paris. 1928.
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Converse Suing 31 Companies Over Knock Off Chucks

The Nike-owned Converse brand yesterday "called foul” on 31 retailers and manufacturers including Walmart, Kmart, Skechers and H&M by filing 22 trademark infringement suits in U.S. District Court in Brooklyn. As a Huffington Post hed puts it, Converse is suing “Basically Everyone In The World Over Knockoff Chucks.”

“For generations, the Chuck Taylor, universally known as the ‘Chuck,’ has captured the hearts and minds of millions of consumers, selling over a billion pairs globally during the past century,” Converse CEO Jim Calhoun said in a statement forwarded to the HP’s Alexander C. Kaufman. “We welcome fair competition, but we do not believe companies have the right to copy the Chuck’s trademarked look.”

Although Converse “is suing for monetary damages, its main priority is getting impostors off the shelves,” reports the New York Times’ Rachel Abrams, who broke the story.

“The goal really is to stop this action,” Calhoun told Abrams. “I think we’re quite fortunate here to be in the possession of what we would consider to be an American icon.”

This may be one of those rare occasions where “icon” is not overplayed.

“First came the athletes, then the greasers. Then came the nonconformists, the teenagers and finally the baby boomers,” Abrams writes in her lede. “The shoe manufacturer Converse has sold its brand of cool and whiff of rebellion to generations of Americans.”

Tell me ’bout it.

Before they were “Chucks,” they were “Cons” — at least in our neck of the Bronx woods. And we used to walk more than six miles round trip to an Army Navy store on Fordham Road — careful to avoid the fabled greasers (who we actually never saw) — to get them for $14 instead of the standard $16 or so. They came in two colors, white or black, and two styles, high-top or low-top.

by Thom Forbes, MediaPost |  Read more:

Image: Earl Wilson/The New York Times

Jose Augusto Castro
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Algorithmic Menagerie

Algorithmic Menagerie is a continuation of and the MFA thesis work of my long term research exploring artificial life and self-organization in the field of computer-based generative art. Programmed in Processing, Algorithmic Menagerie is an interactive virtual environment inhabited by algorithmic creatures. These creatures with dynamic cellular structures are created using various methods of finite subdivision on geometric objects, and exhibit different kinds of biological interactions with each other, reaching an equilibrium within the simulated ecosystem. Audience participants are invited to intervene or interact in the life processes.

For the audio part of the project, I collaborated with my colleague K. Michael Fox, who designed unique sonification rule for each species and sonified the entire simulated eco-system in real-time using Super Collider.

See it in motion in this video:

Raven Kwok

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Band-Aid Relief

Suppose you're a dumbass. Suppose too, you're trying to make a simple chicken curry and you happen to slice your fingers with a very sharp knife. Blood spurts everywhere - all over your countertops (your freshly cut salad, your nicely sliced bread, your floor, your sink). You turn on a faucet, plunge your hand under the cold water but the blood keeps throbbing out.  So you grab some paper towels, wrap them tightly around your injured hand and go frantically searching for band-aids to staunch the flow of bleeding.

Relief. There they are, right there behind the Maalox. Pulling out the now blood-splattered box, you wrench the lid off, fumble to unstrip each individual band-aid, tear at the paper with your teeth, fumble some more, then finally get one free so you can peel away another layer of backstripping... all the while spurting blood everywhere. By the time you're done your band-aid is useless, it's been soaked and you have to try another one.

Sound familiar?

Hey, Masters of the Universe, Silicon Brainiacs, Entrepreneurs everywhere. Why can't someone develop an efficient band-aid delivery system after all these millennia? I know, you're too busy wiring new fiber-optic trading systems, brainstorming Social Networks, finding the next Angry Birds. Whatever. But, really? C'mon. An efficient band-aid dispenser could win the next Nobel Prize (if for no other reason than an entire world would be grateful).

I know... there are probably products out there that already do something like this. All I have to say to that is, DIE.

If you can't make a market out of a clear-cut no-brainer like this, then get out of the way and let someone who can. Is it so hard to make a dispenser that will produce band-aids like tissue paper, or like those roller-stamp thingies? Is that too much to ask?  Apparently.

by markk
Image: via:
(typing with eight fingers)

Extinction Pop

Can words be pop? A few decades ago, “Anthropocene” did not really exist, but its Google Ngram looks like a swift takeoff, similar in shape to the graphs for atmospheric CO2concentration or species extinction. It is at least bubbling under.

“Anthropocene” doesn’t refer precisely to climate change or global warming. Rather, it indicates the idea that we are living in an era akin to other geological epochs, like the Pleistocene, but characterized by the fact that human activities now make and remake the planetary ecosystem in the most concrete sense: the composition of the earth’s crust, the makeup of its atmosphere, the direct and indirect relations among the whole rig’s parts.

Formulated by ecologist Eugene Stoermer and popularized around 2000 by Paul Crutzen, a Nobel Prize–winning atmospheric chemist, “Anthropocene” is intended to signal a radical break and an absolute catastrophe. In previous epochs, the flora and fauna of the planet were part of a rolling equilibrium. Now anthropos has leapt from its limited role to give the entire ecosystem one direction. This is “the Great Acceleration.” The changes set in motion are at the point of becoming self-reproducing, of proceeding on their own no matter what we do. The direction is toward complete destruction of the planetary equilibrium. We’re taking it all down with us.

The fear haunting such knowledge has made its way into the traditional channels of culture, film especially. Half of the year’s blockbusters fit into Cinema of the Anthropocene. An annihilating power, beyond human scale but still somehow set loose by humans, cannot be recalled; the disaster will be civilizational, planetary—Godzilla, Noah, Edge of Tomorrow. What part of Transformers: Age of Extinction do you not understand?

There is certainly something suggestive about the whirling, recombinatory machines in Transformers, at which the puny humans gaze in apprehensive wonder. Are they the “Anthropocene”? Not really. The word itself is not an analysis. An analysis tells you where to intervene; “Anthropocene” fails this measure utterly. Anthropoi, humans, have a history stretching back at least 50,000 years. The standard accounts of the anthropogenic transformation of the planet date it only to the late eighteenth century, to the invention of the steam engine and the Industrial Revolution, the cauldron from whence the transformational machines arise.

But there is a fatal risk in associating “Anthropocene” with specific technologies, as if one could abolish them to make things right. Or as if good technology might overcome the bad to rescue humanity—the dream of the Autobots, surely stand-ins these days for green capitalism. But all of this is to misrecognize the history of machines. The idea that humans make machines out of some need to conquer nature, or out of some ineradicable appetite for power and destruction, can’t explain why this deep human nature would be born so suddenly and so late. In point of fact, the trajectory of ecocidal technologies is indissociable from the competition for ever-greater productivity, the need to make ever more things to be sold more swiftly, to exploit labor more effectively. Machines are an effect of capitalism’s compulsion. If we broke them, like the Luddites of 1811, they would be built again. Not because of someone’s greed or shortsightedness, but because capitalists have no choice but to outcompete each other or cease to exist. “Anthropocene,” we might say, is a social relation. It is the penultimate stage of capitalism. You don’t want to see the ultimate.

by Joshua Clover, The Nation | Read more:
Image:uncredited

Path Places: Your Personal Concierge

[ed. Interesting concept, but as the article notes, scalability could be a problem. Plus, how would Places determine if it was actually responsible for a sale (will it rely on merchants to do that, what's their incentive)? What if a customer buys something else? We'll probably be seeing other applications like this in the near future, but the human element in this one already seems kind of... dated.]

Path Talk 1.1 introduced Places, which aims to be a free digital assistant in ways that actually matter. Forget about messaging or humble brags to your friends about where you’re at (really, do we care?). Places is all about you and the places you want to visit. It’s so drastically different from what Path has previously offered that it’s tough to believe it’s coming from the same company. In a blog post, the Path Team, describes the service:

“Places gives you the power to message your favorite local businesses to request appointments, make reservations, or even check out prices and hours. It’s all by text. And it’s all for free. Getting answers from a local business is now as easy as texting a friend. Search for Places like your hair salon, favorite sporting store, or the new restaurant down the street. Then send a message asking for anything — a haircut appointment, availability of running shoes in your size, or reservations for 2 at 8 p.m. Once you send your message, one of our Path Agents will make the phone call on your behalf, doing all the talking for you. And when they get the response, they’ll immediately text you back with the answer or booking. You’ll never have to wait on hold again.” [ed.]

Game-changing announcements don’t happen in earnest very often in this space, but this has the potential to be precisely that. Highfalutin’ outfits like American Express have offered gratis concierge services to those who hold elite credit cards, but actually using those services has proven difficult — for AmEx Platinum card holders, ask yourself the last time you actually used the card’s concierge service to book a ticket. We’re willing to bet it hasn’t been anytime recent. Places works with any data connection, without requiring you to utter a word. Perhaps most importantly, Places relies on a team of actual humans behind the scenes to address your requests, which injects logic and reasoning and ensures that your demands are dealt with professionally.

Will It Work?

It just might. The obvious concerns are monetization and scale. It costs money to hire a network of always-on professionals to address requests as they arrive in real time. But look at it this way: what if you ran a small business and were approached by Path? If Path requested a small percentage of a sale for each person that it referred to you by way of an interaction in Places, might you consider it? There’s no setup cost for your business, and no ongoing risk or management requirements. Many businesses have been looking for something similar to this for years.

Scale could be an issue if revenues can’t match expenses for a prolonged period of time, but as we mentioned before, Path has millions in its coffers to experiment with. If it can cast its net wide enough, and get enough businesses in its network, this is the type of service that would become addictive after a single use. If you don’t believe that, try using Uber just once. Technologies may come and go, but instant gratification will forever be delectable.

by Darren Murph, Gear Patrol |  Read more:

Image: Eric Yang

Glut of Postdoc Researchers Stirs Quiet Crisis in Science

The life of the humble biomedical postdoctoral researcher was never easy: toiling in obscurity in a low-paying scientific apprenticeship that can stretch more than a decade. The long hours were worth it for the expected reward — the chance to launch an independent laboratory and do science that could expand human understanding of biology and disease.

But in recent years, the postdoc position has become less a stepping stone and more of a holding tank. Some of the smartest people in Boston are caught up in an all-but-invisible crisis, mired in a biomedical underclass as federal funding for research has leveled off, leaving the supply of well-trained scientists outstripping demand.

“It’s sunk in that it’s by no means guaranteed — for anyone, really — that an academic position is possible,” said Gary McDowell, 29, a biologist doing his second postdoc at Tufts University who hopes to set up his own lab in a few years. “There’s this huge labor force here to do the bench work, the grunt work of science. But then there’s nowhere for them to go; this massive pool of postdocs that accumulates and keeps growing.”

Postdocs fill an essential, but little-known niche in the scientific pipeline. After spending 6 to 7 years on average earning a PhD, they invest more years of training in a senior scientist’s laboratory as the final precursor to starting labs where they can explore their own scientific ideas.

In the Boston area, where more than 8,000 postdocs — largely in the biosciences — are estimated to work, tough job prospects are more than just an issue of academic interest. Postdocs are a critical part of the scientific landscape that in many ways distinguishes the region — they are both future leaders and the workers who carry out experiments crucial for science to advance.

The plight of postdocs has become a point of national discussion among senior scientists, as their struggles have come to be seen as symptoms of broader problems plaguing biomedical research. After years of rapid growth, federal funding abruptly leveled off and even contracted over the last decade, leaving a glut of postdocs vying for a limited number of faculty jobs. Paradoxically, as they’ve gotten stuck, the pursuit of research breakthroughs has also become reliant on them as a cheap source of labor for senior scientists.

Biomedical research training traditionally has followed a well-worn path. After college, people who want to pursue an advanced degree enroll in graduate school. The vast majority of biology graduate students then go on to do one or more postdoc positions, where they continue their training, often well into their 30s. (...)

The problem is that any researcher running a lab today is training far more people than there will ever be labs to run. Often these supremely well-educated trainees are simply cheap laborers, not learning skills for the careers where they are more likely to find jobs — teaching, industry, government or nonprofit jobs, or consulting.

This wasn’t such an issue decades ago, but universities have expanded the number of PhD students they train — there were about 30,000 biomedical graduate students in 1979 and 56,800 in 2009. That has had the effect of flooding the system with trainees and drawing out the training period.

In 1970, scientists typically received their first major federal funding when they were 34. In 2011, those lucky enough to get a coveted tenure-track faculty position and run their own labs, at an average age of 37, don’t get the equivalent grant until nearly a decade later, at age 42.

Facing these stark statistics, postdocs are taking matters into their own hands. They organized a Future of Research conference in Boston last week that they hoped would give voice to their frustrations and hopes and help shape change.

“How can we, as the next generation, run the system?” said Kristin Krukenberg, 34, a lead organizer of the conference and a biologist in her sixth year as a postdoc at Harvard Medical School after six years in graduate school. Krukenberg plans to apply for faculty positions this year, and said that as she has neared the end of her long years of training, she has begun to think deeply about her future responsibilities to the people in her lab.

“Some of the models we see don’t seem tenable in the long run,” Krukenberg said.

by Carolyn Y. Johnson, Boston Globe | Read more:
Image: Jessica Rinaldi

Jan Versnel

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Dancing Through Life

"In Germany, the Expressionist current triggered a wealth of exchanges between painters and dancers. While Laban embodied the new figure of the dancer as educator and theoretician, Mary Wigman, one of his pupils at the free community of Monte Verità, best epitomized the figure of woman beset with life and death urges, as illustrated in her famous Witch's dance. Wigman, who viewed herself as a dancer of humanity, proved equally fascinating to painters Emil Nolde and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, not to mention her pupil Gret Palucca."

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Mary Wigman via: Wikipedia

What If Gluten Sensitivity Isn’t Just About Gluten?

Gluten sensitivity — the kind that’s not associated with celiac disease — is a mysterious thing. An estimated 18 million people don’t fit the criteria for celiac disease, the genetic disorder that erodes the small intestine and causes digestive symptoms like bloating and stomach pain. And yet consuming gluten still makes them feel awful, notes health writer Jane Brody in a two-part series on the protein for the New York Times this week. But what if gluten is only a piece of the puzzle?

A bit buried in her second article, Brody nods to some overlooked nutrition research published last year, which indicates that for many who are currently considered to have non-celiac gluten sensitivity, gluten may not be the only thing that’s causing their health issues. The real culprit, this study suggests, may be a group of sugars represented by the somewhat unwieldy acronym FODMAPs, which Brody defines like so:

Fodmaps is an acronym for fermentable oligosaccharides, disaccharides, monosaccharides and polyols, sugars that draw water into the intestinal tract. They may be poorly digested or absorbed, and become fodder for colonic bacteria that produce gas and can cause abdominal distress.

And this is a big deal, some nutrition scientists say, because so far non-celiac gluten sensitivity has mostly been defined by what it isn’t: It’s not a wheat allergy, and it’s not celiac disease. It does result in the same gastrointestinal issues that plague celiac patients, but it’s also often accompanied by symptoms outside the gut: headache, joint pain, foggy mind.

The idea of non-celiac gluten sensitivity was established in the scientific community back in 2011, when a study published in Nature by a team of Australian researchers concluded that it “may exist.” This research was among the first to show that people who did not have celiac disease could still suffer from celiac-like symptoms after consuming gluten, including bloating, intestinal pain, and tiredness.

But many of the people in this study still experienced these symptoms long after switching to a gluten-free diet. And so the researchers decided to continue to follow these folks. They asked the participants to switch from their gluten-free diet to a diet low in FODMAPs, which means avoiding a pretty extensive list of fruits, veggies, and grains containing those sugars that are harder for some to digest. Some of those foods do contain gluten, but many do not. For more detail, here’s a list of foods considered to be high and low in FODMAPs.

by Melissa Dahl, NY Magazine | Read more:
Image: uncredited

The Copenhagen Wheel: If an Electric Bike Is Ever Going to Hit It Big in the U.S., It's This One

On a sunny but brisk spring morning near the Charles River in Cambridge, I took a test ride on the bicycle of the future. No rockets or lasers (alas), the bicycle of the future looks pretty much like the bicycle of the present. But with the first pumps of my feet on the pedals, I felt the difference. The bike wasn't just moving, it was pushing, adding extra propulsion to my own pedaling, giving me a boost with every revolution of the pedals. Faster than expected, I reached the end of a quiet block leaning into a corner. I took a straightaway for a few blocks and pushed 20 miles an hour without hardly trying. My feet were putting out a solid paper-route effort, but the bike had me racing in the Tour de France.

The bike I tested was equipped with the Copenhagen Wheel, an electric pedal-assist motor fully contained in the oversized red hub of an otherwise normal back bicycle wheel. Inside that red hub is a delicately crammed array of computing equipment, sensors, and a three-phase brushless direct current electric motor that can feel the torque of my pedaling and add appropriately scaled assistance.

Replace the back wheel of any bike with the Copenhagen Wheel and it's instantly an electric bike—one that not only assists the rider but senses the surrounding topography and can even collect and share data about environmental, traffic, and road conditions. First developed in 2009, through a partnership between MIT's Senseable City Lab and the City of Copenhagen, the wheel is now in its first stages of commercial production. By the end of 2014, thousands will be shipped out to fulfill pre-orders around the world.

With its focus on design and simple application of complex technology, the Copenhagen Wheel is perhaps the sleekest version of the electric bike. But it's hardly the only one. Millions of electric bicycles are being used in cities all over the world, offering cheap and accessible forms of transportation in developing countries and dense urban environments. And though bicycling has long been considered recreation in the United States, the electric bicycle is about to become the next big thing in urban transportation.

by Nate Berg, CityLab |  Read more:

Image: Michael D. Spencer / Superpedestrian

Yo, Mr. White!
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Ernst Haas

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Marriage Is an Abduction

The word “marriage” occurs about a hundred times in Gillian Flynn’s novel “Gone Girl”; there are sixty instances of “husband.” “Wife” maxes out the Kindle search feature at a hundred instances in the first hundred and forty-seven pages—that’s just thirty-seven per cent of the book. If there is some way of searching the remaining sixty-three per cent, I haven’t figured it out. I feel certain that she’s there, this “wife,” many more times—but I can’t find her. As sometimes happens, the limitations of the medium amplify the message: wives are people who disappear.

“Gone Girl” has sold over eight and a half million copies—a number sure to rise in the wake of the film adaptation, which topped the box office last weekend. The plot centers on the failed marriage of the beautiful, accomplished magazine writer Amy Elliott (whose childhood was immortalized by her parents in a creepy children’s book series, “Amazing Amy”) and Nick Dunne, a handsome aspiring novelist from Missouri. Their conjugal happiness is first interrupted by the financial crisis: Nick and Amy lose their magazine jobs, sell their brownstone, and buy a house in Missouri, where Nick can attend to his dying mother. The mother duly dies. The couple is haunted by Nick’s foul-mouthed, demented father, who periodically escapes from his care facility and runs around town shouting vile things at women. Nick uses the last of Amy’s trust fund to open a bar. He may or may not be having an affair. They may or may not be trying to have a baby. On the morning of the couple’s fifth wedding anniversary, Amy disappears in what looks like an abduction, and a nationwide manhunt begins.

Parallels may be drawn between “Gone Girl” and Lionel Shriver’s 2003 best-seller “We Need to Talk About Kevin,” which was adapted into a movie in 2011. Shriver’s novel tells the story of a woman whose husband talks her into having children; parenthood, he feels, is the only possible answer to the big existential questions. But she, through some horrific transference, passes her spiritual emptiness to her son, who eventually perpetrates a school massacre.

The central characters in both “Gone Girl” and “We Need to Talk About Kevin” are smart, acerbic New York women—successful writers, amazing cooks, lovers of European culture—who are somehow unable to find happiness with their apparent male counterparts. (This parade of weird, milquetoast intellectuals is best summed up in the character of the billionaire, Proust-reciting Scrabble buff played, in the “Gone Girl” adaptation, by Neil Patrick Harris.) Both women marry salt-of-the-earth, all-American types, manly men who know how to fuck a woman’s brains out and then take her to see the fence that Tom Sawyer whitewashed. Both are relocated by their strong, manly husbands from fantastic Manhattan apartments to suburban McMansions, where they are given to understand that the time has come to set aside frivolous pursuits and have children.

Both books restage marriage as a violent crime—an abduction. An independent, expressive single woman is taken from New York; her beautiful body is disfigured, or threatened with disfigurement; and her accomplishments are systematically taken away or negated, rendered worthless by comparison to that all-trumping colossus of meaning, childbirth. (Clearly, many women find happiness in much this way; but, equally clearly, many of them don’t and can’t.) These narratives speak less to the specific challenges of having a sociopath for a child or a spouse than to the pathology of the unstated assumptions that we all pass along and receive. They speak to the revelation lying in wait for women when they hit the ages of marriageability and childbirth: that their carefully created and manicured identities were never the point; the point was for it all to be sacrificed to children and to men.

But perhaps “Gone Girl” ’s greatest insight is that the men aren’t mere brutish exploiters. Where a more simplistic narrative would posit that every loss for women is a gain for men, Flynn shows again and again that nobody is a winner—everyone is a dupe. Girls are set up for a horrific disappointment, but boys are set up to be horrifically disappointing. Boys are taught to protect, but how do you protect someone who has the same basic rights as you do, and from whom you are also demanding a huge sacrifice? How do you protect someone who is too good for you—not too pure or too lofty but actually better than you at day trading, running marathons, and looking like a million bucks? (...)

Before a TV interview, Nick, the most hated man in America, is instructed, “You have to admit you’re a jerk and that everything was all your fault.” “So, like, what men are supposed to do in general,” he replies. This line got a lot of rueful laughs at the screening I attended. “Gone Girl” is as much about the near impossibility of being a good husband as it is about the anguish of being a good wife. The bat-shit preposterousness of the marital “accord” ultimately reached by Nick and Amy is an indictment of the state of marriage, and of heterosexual relations more broadly.

by Elif Batuman, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: 20th Century Fox

Scheherazade

"I was a lamprey eel in a former life,” Scheherazade said once, as they lay in bed together. It was a simple, straightforward comment, as offhand as if she had announced that the North Pole was in the far north. Habara hadn’t a clue what sort of creature a lamprey was, much less what one looked like. So he had no particular opinion on the subject.

“Do you know how a lamprey eats a trout?” she asked.

He didn’t. In fact, it was the first time he’d heard that lampreys ate trout.

“Lampreys have no jaws. That’s what sets them apart from other eels.”

“Huh? Eels have jaws?”

“Haven’t you ever taken a good look at one?” she said, surprised.

“I do eat eel now and then, but I’ve never had an opportunity to see if they have jaws.”

“Well, you should check it out sometime. Go to an aquarium or someplace like that. Regular eels have jaws with teeth. But lampreys have only suckers, which they use to attach themselves to rocks at the bottom of a river or lake. Then they just kind of float there, waving back and forth, like weeds.”

Habara imagined a bunch of lampreys swaying like weeds at the bottom of a lake. The scene seemed somehow divorced from reality, although reality, he knew, could at times be terribly unreal.

“Lampreys live like that, hidden among the weeds. Lying in wait. Then, when a trout passes overhead, they dart up and fasten on to it with their suckers. Inside their suckers are these tonguelike things with teeth, which rub back and forth against the trout’s belly until a hole opens up and they can start eating the flesh, bit by bit.”

“I wouldn’t like to be a trout,” Habara said.

“Back in Roman times, they raised lampreys in ponds. Uppity slaves got chucked in and the lampreys ate them alive.”

Habara thought that he wouldn’t have enjoyed being a Roman slave, either.

“The first time I saw a lamprey was back in elementary school, on a class trip to the aquarium,” Scheherazade said. “The moment I read the description of how they lived, I knew that I’d been one in a former life. I mean, I could actually remember—being fastened to a rock, swaying invisibly among the weeds, eying the fat trout swimming by above me.”

“Can you remember eating them?”

“No, I can’t.”

“That’s a relief,” Habara said. “But is that all you recall from your life as a lamprey—swaying to and fro at the bottom of a river?”

“A former life can’t be called up just like that,” she said. “If you’re lucky, you get a flash of what it was like. It’s like catching a glimpse through a tiny hole in a wall. Can you recall any of your former lives?”

“No, not one,” Habara said. Truth be told, he had never felt the urge to revisit a former life. He had his hands full with the present one.

“Still, it felt pretty neat at the bottom of the lake. Upside down with my mouth fastened to a rock, watching the fish pass overhead. I saw a really big snapping turtle once, too, a humongous black shape drifting past, like the evil spaceship in ‘Star Wars.’ And big white birds with long, sharp beaks; from below, they looked like white clouds floating across the sky.”

“And you can see all these things now?”

“As clear as day,” Scheherazade said. “The light, the pull of the current, everything. Sometimes I can even go back there in my mind.”

“To what you were thinking then?”

“Yeah.”

“What do lampreys think about?”

“Lampreys think very lamprey-like thoughts. About lamprey-like topics in a context that’s very lamprey-like. There are no words for those thoughts. They belong to the world of water. It’s like when we were in the womb. We were thinking things in there, but we can’t express those thoughts in the language we use out here. Right?”

“Hold on a second! You can remember what it was like in the womb?”

“Sure,” Scheherazade said, lifting her head to see over his chest. “Can’t you?”

No, he said. He couldn’t.

“Then I’ll tell you sometime. About life in the womb.”

“Scheherazade, Lamprey, Former Lives” was what Habara recorded in his diary that day. He doubted that anyone who came across it would guess what the words meant.

by Haruki Murakami, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Merlin

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[ed. Go Seahawks!]
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[ed. 3hrs. later... ouch.]