Editing the Human Genome

A group of leading biologists on Thursday called for a worldwide moratorium on use of a new genome-editing technique that would alter human DNA in a way that can be inherited.

The biologists fear that the new technique is so effective and easy to use that some physicians may push ahead before its safety can be assessed. They also want the public to understand the ethical issues surrounding the technique, which could be used to cure genetic diseases, but also to enhance qualities like beauty or intelligence. The latter is a path that many ethicists believe should never be taken.

“You could exert control over human heredity with this technique, and that is why we are raising the issue,” said David Baltimore, a former president of the California Institute of Technology and a member of the group whose paper on the topic was published in the journal Science.

Ethicists, for decades, have been concerned about the dangers of altering the human germline — meaning to make changes to human sperm, eggs or embryos that will last through the life of the individual and be passed on to future generations. Until now, these worries have been theoretical. But a technique invented in 2012 makes it possible to edit the genome precisely and with much greater ease. The technique has already been used to edit the genomes of mice, rats and monkeys, and few doubt that it would work the same way in people.

The technique holds the power to repair or enhance any human gene. “It raises the most fundamental of issues about how we are going to view our humanity in the future and whether we are going to take the dramatic step of modifying our own germline and in a sense take control of our genetic destiny, which raises enormous peril for humanity,” said George Q. Daley, a stem cell expert at Boston Children’s Hospital and a member of the group. (...)

Recombinant DNA was the first in a series of ever-improving steps for manipulating genetic material. The chief problem has always been one of accuracy, of editing the DNA at precisely the intended site, since any off-target change could be lethal. Two recent methods, known as zinc fingers and TAL effectors, came close to the goal of accurate genome editing, but both are hard to use. The new genome-editing approach was invented by Jennifer A. Doudna of the University of California, Berkeley, and Emmanuelle Charpentier of Umea University in Sweden.

Their method, known by the acronym Crispr-Cas9, co-opts the natural immune system with which bacteria remember the DNA of the viruses that attack them so they are ready the next time those same invaders appear. Researchers can simply prime the defense system with a guide sequence of their choice and it will then destroy the matching DNA sequence in any genome presented to it. Dr. Doudna is the lead author of the Science article calling for control of the technique and organized the meeting at which the statement was developed.

Though highly efficient, the technique occasionally cuts the genome at unintended sites. The issue of how much mistargeting could be tolerated in a clinical setting is one that Dr. Doudna’s group wants to see thoroughly explored before any human genome is edited.

Scientists also say that replacing a defective gene with a normal one may seem entirely harmless but perhaps would not be.

“We worry about people making changes without the knowledge of what those changes mean in terms of the overall genome,” Dr. Baltimore said. “I personally think we are just not smart enough — and won’t be for a very long time — to feel comfortable about the consequences of changing heredity, even in a single individual.” (...)

There are two broad schools of thought on modifying the human germline, said R. Alta Charo, a bioethicist at the University of Wisconsin and a member of the Doudna group. One is pragmatic and seeks to balance benefit and risk. The other “sets up inherent limits on how much humankind should alter nature,” she said. Some Christian doctrines oppose the idea of playing God, whereas in Judaism and Islam there is the notion “that humankind is supposed to improve the world.” She described herself as more of a pragmatist, saying, “I would try to regulate such things rather than shut a new technology down at its beginning.”

by Nicholas Wade, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Elizabeth D. Herman

American scientist James Stuckey and volunteer Judy Creeden demonstrate the human body’s ability to function as a conductor of electricity during a lecture in New York sponsored by the Atomic Energy Commission, 1966 | photo by F. Roy Kemp

[ed. Science lectures were a bit livelier back then.]

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Defensive Architecture

More than 100 homeless people are “living” in the terminals of Heathrow airport this winter, according to official figures – a new and shameful record. Crisis and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation have warned that homelessness in London is rising significantly faster than the nationwide average, and faster than official estimates. And yet, we don’t see as many people sleeping rough as in previous economic downturns. Have our cities become better at hiding poverty, or have we become more adept at not seeing it?

Last year, there was great public outcry against the use of “anti-homeless” spikes outside a London residential complex, not far from where I live. Social media was set momentarily ablaze with indignation, a petition was signed, a sleep-in protest undertaken, Boris Johnson was incensed and within a few days they were removed. This week, however, it emerged that Selfridges had installed metal spikes outside one of its Manchester stores – apparently to “reduce litter and smoking … following customer complaints”. The phenomenon of “defensive” or “disciplinary” architecture, as it is known, remains pervasive.

From ubiquitous protrusions on window ledges to bus-shelter seats that pivot forward, from water sprinklers and loud muzak to hard tubular rests, from metal park benches with solid dividers to forests of pointed cement bollards under bridges, urban spaces are aggressively rejecting soft, human bodies.

We see these measures all the time within our urban environments, whether in London or Tokyo, but we fail to process their true intent. I hardly noticed them before I became homeless in 2009. An economic crisis, a death in the family, a sudden breakup and an even more sudden breakdown were all it took to go from a six-figure income to sleeping rough in the space of a year. It was only then that I started scanning my surroundings with the distinct purpose of finding shelter and the city’s barbed cruelty became clear. (...)

“When you’re designed against, you know it,” says Ocean Howell, who teaches architectural history at the University of Oregon, speaking about anti-skateboarding designs. “Other people might not see it, but you will. The message is clear: you are not a member of the public, at least not of the public that is welcome here.” The same is true of all defensive architecture. The psychological effect is devastating.

There is a wider problem, too. These measures do not and cannot distinguish the “vagrant” posterior from others considered more deserving. When we make it impossible for the dispossessed to rest their weary bodies at a bus shelter, we also make it impossible for the elderly, for the infirm, for the pregnant woman who has had a dizzy spell. By making the city less accepting of the human frame, we make it less welcoming to all humans. By making our environment more hostile, we become more hostile within it.

Defensive architecture is revealing on a number of levels, because it is not the product of accident or thoughtlessness, but a thought process. It is a sort of unkindness that is considered, designed, approved, funded and made real with the explicit motive to exclude and harass. It reveals how corporate hygiene has overridden human considerations, especially in retail districts. It is a symptom of the clash of private and public, of necessity and property.

by Alex Andreou, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Imaginechina/REX

Japan Opts for Massive, Costly Sea Wall to Fend Off Tsunamis

Four years after a towering tsunami ravaged much of Japan's northeastern coast, efforts to fend off future disasters are focusing on a nearly 400-kilometer (250-mile) chain of cement sea walls, at places nearly five stories high.

Opponents of the 820 billion yen ($6.8 billion) plan argue that the massive concrete barriers will damage marine ecology and scenery, hinder vital fisheries and actually do little to protect residents who are mostly supposed to relocate to higher ground. Those in favor say the sea walls are a necessary evil, and one that will provide some jobs, at least for a time.

In the northern fishing port of Osabe, Kazutoshi Musashi chafes at the 12.5-meter (41-foot)-high concrete barrier blocking his view of the sea.

"The reality is that it looks like the wall of a jail," said Musashi, 46, who lived on the seaside before the tsunami struck Osabe and has moved inland since.

Pouring concrete for public works is a staple strategy for the ruling Liberal Democratic Party and its backers in big business and construction, and local officials tend to go along with such plans.

The paradox of such projects, experts say, is that while they may reduce some damage, they can foster complacency. That can be a grave risk along coastlines vulnerable to tsunamis, storm surges and other natural disasters. At least some of the 18,500 people who died or went missing in the 2011 disasters failed to heed warnings to escape in time.

Tsuneaki Iguchi was mayor of Iwanuma, a town just south of the region's biggest city, Sendai, when the tsunami triggered by a magnitude-9 earthquake just off the coast inundated half of its area.

A 7.2-meter (24-foot) -high sea wall built years earlier to help stave off erosion of Iwanuma's beaches slowed the wall of water, as did stands of tall, thin pine trees planted along the coast. But the tsunami still swept up to 5 kilometers (3 miles) inland. Passengers and staff watched from the upper floors and roof of the airport as the waves carried off cars, buildings and aircraft, smashing most homes in densely populated suburbs not far from the beach.

The city repaired the broken sea walls but doesn't plan to make them any taller. Instead, Iguchi was one of the first local officials to back a plan championed by former Prime Minister Morihiro Hosokawa to plant mixed forests along the coasts on tall mounds of soil or rubble, to help create a living "green wall" that would persist long after the concrete of the bigger, man-made structures has crumbled.

"We don't need the sea wall to be higher. What we do need is for everyone to evacuate," Iguchi said. (...)

The risk is not confined to Japan, said Maarten van Aalst, director of the Red Cross/Red Crescent Climate Center, who sees this in the attitudes of fellow Dutch people who trust in their low-lying country's defenses against the sea.

"The public impression of safety is so high, they would have no idea what to do in case of a catastrophe," he said.

Despite pockets of opposition, getting people to agree to forego the sea walls and opt instead for Hosokawa's "Great Forest Wall" plan is a tough sell, says Tomoaki Takahashi, whose job is to win support for the forest project in local communities.

"Actually, many people are in favor of the sea walls, because they will create jobs," said Takahashi. "But even people who really don't like the idea also feel as if they would be shunned if they don't go along with those who support the plan," he said.

While the "Great Forest Wall" being planted in some areas would not stave off flooding, it would slow tsunamis and weaken the force of their waves. As waters recede, the vegetation would help prevent buildings and other debris from flowing back out to sea. Such projects would also allow rain water to flow back into the sea, a vital element of marine ecology.

by Elaine Kurtenbach, AP |  Read more:

Image: /Eugene Hoshiko/AP

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In College and Hiding From Scary Ideas

Katherine Byron, a senior at Brown University and a member of its Sexual Assault Task Force, considers it her duty to make Brown a safe place for rape victims, free from anything that might prompt memories of trauma.

So when she heard last fall that a student group had organized a debate about campus sexual assault between Jessica Valenti, the founder of feministing.com, and Wendy McElroy, a libertarian, and that Ms. McElroy was likely to criticize the term “rape culture,” Ms. Byron was alarmed. “Bringing in a speaker like that could serve to invalidate people’s experiences,” she told me. It could be “damaging.”

Ms. Byron and some fellow task force members secured a meeting with administrators. Not long after, Brown’s president, Christina H. Paxson, announced that the university would hold a simultaneous, competing talk to provide “research and facts” about “the role of culture in sexual assault.” Meanwhile, student volunteers put up posters advertising that a “safe space” would be available for anyone who found the debate too upsetting.

The safe space, Ms. Byron explained, was intended to give people who might find comments “troubling” or “triggering,” a place to recuperate. The room was equipped with cookies, coloring books, bubbles, Play-Doh, calming music, pillows, blankets and a video of frolicking puppies, as well as students and staff members trained to deal with trauma. Emma Hall, a junior, rape survivor and “sexual assault peer educator” who helped set up the room and worked in it during the debate, estimates that a couple of dozen people used it. At one point she went to the lecture hall — it was packed — but after a while, she had to return to the safe space. “I was feeling bombarded by a lot of viewpoints that really go against my dearly and closely held beliefs,” Ms. Hall said.

Safe spaces are an expression of the conviction, increasingly prevalent among college students, that their schools should keep them from being “bombarded” by discomfiting or distressing viewpoints. Think of the safe space as the live-action version of the better-known trigger warning, a notice put on top of a syllabus or an assigned reading to alert students to the presence of potentially disturbing material. (...)

Last fall, the president of Smith College, Kathleen McCartney, apologized for causing students and faculty to be “hurt” when she failed to object to a racial epithet uttered by a fellow panel member at an alumnae event in New York. The offender was the free-speech advocate Wendy Kaminer, who had been arguing against the use of the euphemism “the n-word” when teaching American history or “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” In the uproar that followed, the Student Government Association wrote a letter declaring that “if Smith is unsafe for one student, it is unsafe for all students.”

“It’s amazing to me that they can’t distinguish between racist speech and speech about racist speech, between racism and discussions of racism,” Ms. Kaminer said in an email.

The confusion is telling, though. It shows that while keeping college-level discussions “safe” may feel good to the hypersensitive, it’s bad for them and for everyone else. People ought to go to college to sharpen their wits and broaden their field of vision. Shield them from unfamiliar ideas, and they’ll never learn the discipline of seeing the world as other people see it. They’ll be unprepared for the social and intellectual headwinds that will hit them as soon as they step off the campuses whose climates they have so carefully controlled. What will they do when they hear opinions they’ve learned to shrink from? If they want to change the world, how will they learn to persuade people to join them?

Only a few of the students want stronger anti-hate-speech codes. Mostly they ask for things like mandatory training sessions and stricter enforcement of existing rules. Still, it’s disconcerting to see students clamor for a kind of intrusive supervision that would have outraged students a few generations ago. But those were hardier souls. Now students’ needs are anticipated by a small army of service professionals — mental health counselors, student-life deans and the like. This new bureaucracy may be exacerbating students’ “self-infantilization,” as Judith Shapiro, the former president of Barnard College, suggested in an essay for Inside Higher Ed.

But why are students so eager to self-infantilize? Their parents should probably share the blame. Eric Posner, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School, wrote on Slate last month that although universities cosset students more than they used to, that’s what they have to do, because today’s undergraduates are more puerile than their predecessors. “Perhaps overprogrammed children engineered to the specifications of college admissions offices no longer experience the risks and challenges that breed maturity,” he wrote. But “if college students are children, then they should be protected like children.”

Another reason students resort to the quasi-medicalized terminology of trauma is that it forces administrators to respond. Universities are in a double bind. They’re required by two civil-rights statutes, Title VII and Title IX, to ensure that their campuses don’t create a “hostile environment” for women and other groups subject to harassment. However, universities are not supposed to go too far in suppressing free speech, either. If a university cancels a talk or punishes a professor and a lawsuit ensues, history suggests that the university will lose. But if officials don’t censure or don’t prevent speech that may inflict psychological damage on a member of a protected class, they risk fostering a hostile environment and prompting an investigation. As a result, students who say they feel unsafe are more likely to be heard than students who demand censorship on other grounds.

by Judith Shulevitz, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Eleanor Taylor

Pollen. Louisa Howard, Dartmouth E.M. Facility, Dartmouth College (repost)
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Tardigrades (also known as waterbears or moss piglets) are water-dwelling, segmented micro-animals, with eight legs.

Tardigrades are classified as extremophiles, organisms that can thrive in a physically or geochemically extreme condition that would be detrimental to most life on Earth. For example, tardigrades can withstand temperatures from just above absolute zero to well above the boiling point of water, pressures about six times greater than those found in the deepest ocean trenches, ionizing radiation at doses hundreds of times higher than the lethal dose for a human, and the vacuum of outer space. They can go without food or water for more than 10 years, drying out to the point where they are 3% or less water, only to rehydrate, forage, and reproduce.
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A Moving Experience

Travel suffers from false advertising. Tour operators, vacation companies, cruise lines, hotel chains, bad travel writers depict it as something “adventurous,” “exciting,” “romantic.” Though disingenuous, it’s understandable: They’re in the business of travel, and their job is to sell it to consumers.

As a result of this hype, people who travel often experience disappointment. Friends will tell you of their wonderful trips, and much of the time they’re being mostly honest. But they conveniently leave out the train they missed due to miscommunications, and the town that was shut tight for a holiday no one told them about. Travel, like football, is best in highlight form.

And people will gleefully tell you about their vacations from hell. The worst trips, travel writers love to say, make the best stories; everybody loves a good tale of woe.

Travel stories are divided, rather religiously, between paradise—a word used promiscuously by travel magazines—and inferno. Those about so-called heavenly places predominate, at least in written form (since most publications are dependent on advertising, and many feel the need to be promotional), while tales of the hellish generally belong to the oral tradition, though they sometimes make it into books, like the excellent anthology Bad Trips. But there is very little middle ground. You not only don’t read, you rarely hear someone say: “The trip was so-so.” Or: “Something was missing.” Or: “I left feeling a little unsatisfied.”

Readers sometimes say to me, You always meet the most interesting people when you travel. I tell them, Not really, I just write about it when I do. Most of the time I’m wandering around lonely and aimless. In my own way, I am as guilty as the cliché-mongers of perpetuating the idea of travel as a continuously fascinating activity—though all writers shape their experiences into an unrepresentative series of highlights; otherwise our stories would be too boring to read.

Condé Nast Traveler has never printed the “Top Ten Places Where You Won’t Feel a Thing.”

But in Reading Chekhov: A Critical Journey, Janet Malcolm writes about her trip to Russia, in the course of which she lost her luggage. The effort to be reunited with her belongings propelled her out of her tourist shell, required her to deal with the locals, introduced a small drama into her journey. She came to the conclusion that “travel itself is a low-key emotional experience, a pallid affair in comparison to ordinary life.” Most tourists, she noted, are not doing anything adventurous or exciting or romantic; they are passive observers, visiting landmarks, looking at paintings, and are less engaged in life than they are on a typical Monday at home. It is only when something happens on our journeys—which is, frequently, something going wrong—that we are able to break through the surface of a place. (...)

Travel has been called the saddest pleasure. Sometimes it’s sad because of what we see: poverty, misery, hopelessness. Kate Simon, writing in Mexico: Places and Pleasures of some of the capital’s less reputable ones, ends the section on a philosophical note: “There is no playfulness in it, nor even much energy, just restlessness and several kinds of desperation and, if the night is cold and damp, the sight will depress you, which you may deserve or even want, if you’ve come this far.”

Often, though, travel is sad because what we see doesn’t include us. Much of a travel writer’s life, I once wrote, is spent watching other people have fun. Everyone who travels has the same experience; we’re all outsiders, excluded from the action. Being left out is never pleasant, but in travel it’s even more frustrating because a few days ago you were not just part of a group, of friends or family, you were the envied and celebrated member, the one heading off, as the travel brochures put it, for exciting adventures in exotic lands.

There are people who don’t need people. David Foster Wallace spent his last days aboard the MV Zenith in his cabin, traumatized by the orchestrated “fun” of cruising. The resulting story—”Shipping Out,” published in Harper’s in 1996—is a recognized masterpiece in the “bad trips, great stories” school. John Steinbeck, in Travels with Charley, drove coast to coast and back again with surprisingly few encounters and—as was revealed not too long ago—even fewer real ones. Bill Bryson, the most popular travel writer of the last few decades, has admitted he doesn’t enjoy talking to strangers.

Of course, writers of any kind are never the norm; those of us who write about travel are different from the start, since we usually head out alone. The reason cited most often is freedom from distraction; when you’re by yourself, you’re more attuned to your surroundings. Less discussed, but just as important, is the fact that, alone, you’re also more sensitive. You not only notice your surroundings more clearly, you respond to them more deeply. Smiles and small kindnesses mean more to the unattached traveler than they do to a happy couple. A merchant in Fethiye adds a few extra sweets to my purchase and I’m extremely touched, in part because no one has paid any attention to me in days. If I’d been there chatting with my wife, I wouldn’t have been so moved; I may not have even been aware. And the merchant quite possibly would not have been inspired like he was by my lonely presence.

Once on a trip I went days without having a conversation with anyone other than myself, which resulted in dangerously low levels of self-esteem. Everyone around me was talking, gesturing, laughing. What was wrong with me? One morning I headed toward a building with sliding glass doors and the doors refused to open. They seemed to confirm my suspicion that I had ceased to exist.

by Thomas Swick, TMN | Read more:
Image: Blair Dike, “Untitled,” 2009

Ubaldo Gandolfi, Mercury About to Behead Argus, ca.1770-75
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An Iranian Journey

Iranian photographer Hossein Fatemi, offers a glimpse of an entirely different side to Iran than the image usually broadcasted by domestic and foreign media. In his photo series An Iranian Journey, many of the photographs reveal an Iran that most people never see, presenting an eye-opening look at the amazing diversity and contrasts that exist in the country.

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Turning Japanese

I travel back and forth between Japan and the United States, mostly Tokyo and New York and a few other American cities, several times a year. The contrast is jarring. Arriving in the US can feel like rolling back a decade or more, returning to a time when information was scarce, infrastructure creaky, and basic services like ground transportation chaotic and unreliable.

I steel myself before landing, my mind tallying variables and unknowns: will my luggage land with me and emerge on the dingy carousel? Will the taxi service I booked online in advance arrive on time, at the right terminal, or at all? Will traffic be an impediment to my destination?

And then there’s the view. Whether it’s the outskirts of Queens on the way from New York’s JFK airport, or the fringes of the Los Angeles highway off-ramps by LAX, everything seems a bit run down and decrepit.

Landing in Tokyo, though, is a breeze. All the travelators and escalators glide silently; the wall-mounted clocks, digital and analogue, tell the right time. When I reach the baggage carousel, my suitcase is already circling. Trains and buses depart punctually. I don’t have to pre-book because they’re scheduled merely minutes apart. I don’t have to think of anything beyond the last book I was reading upon touchdown, fishing out my passport at immigration, and what I might order for dinner that evening once I reach my apartment. Everything seems to be taken care of, and nothing is broken.

As I ease into town, usually via the limousine bus service, the sidewalks outside are teeming with well-dressed urbanites heading home from work or out to restaurants, everyone in motion with purpose and meaning.

But that’s not what the papers say. Japan has seen over two decades of a stagnant-to-recessionary economy since its 1989-90 juggernaut bubble burst. It has become the world’s economic whipping boy, described repeatedly as ‘the sick man of Asia’, incapable of revival, doddering off into the sunset.

Reports of Japan’s societal stagnation are no prettier. Stories about the country’s ageing population and plummeting birth rate abound – with the latter hitting a record low last year amid dire predictions of a disappearing Japan. At current rates, demographers estimate that the overall population will drop 30 million by 2050.

Japan’s 2014 fertility rate is low – 1.4 births per woman – but David Pilling, former Tokyo bureau chief of the Financial Times, notes that South Korea’s is lower; and that those of other developed countries, from Taiwan and Singapore to Germany and Italy, are similarly low.

“Much of the world is going Japan’s way,” says Pilling. “If Japan is doomed, so are many others.”

However, Pilling adds, the alternative isn’t necessarily better. “Can we really only conceive of a successful economy as one where the population increases year after year? By this measure Pakistan and many African countries should be screaming success stories. They’re not.” (...)

What makes one society hold together 'reasonably well', while others fail? You only have to look to the language for insight. Common words like ganbaru (to slog on tenaciously through tough times), gaman (endure with patience, dignity and respect), and jishuku (restrain yourself according to others' needs) convey a culture rooted in pragmatism and perseverance. (...)

Japan's stagnancy, pilloried by economists and analysts in the west, may turn out to be the catalyst for its greatest strengths: resiliency, reinvention and quiet endurance.

Until a couple of years ago, I lectured Japan's best and brightest at the University of Tokyo. My Japanese students were polite to a fault. They handed their essays to me and my teaching assistant with two hands affixed to the paper, like sacred artefacts. They nodded affirmatively when I asked if they understood what I'd said, even when they didn't . They were never late to class, and they never left early.

But when I pressed them on their future plans, they expressed a kind of blissful ambivalence. "I'd like to help improve Japan's legal system," Kazuki, a smart and trilingual student from Kyushu told me. "But if that doesn't work out, I just want to be a good father."

Sayaka, a literature major from Hokkaido, asked me if I understood her generation's dilemma. "We grew up very comfortable," she said. "We learned not to take risks."

No risk-taking – anathema to today’s 'fail-fast', Silicon Valley culture – would seem to indicate stagnation writ large. But what if it's a more futuristic model for all of us, even superior to Japan's sleek, sci-fi bubble-era iconography: all hi-tech and flashy yen, but no soul?

Waseda University professor Norihiro Kato, Op-Ed columnist for the New York Times, sees a radical example in Japanese culture that he describes as a model of 'de-growth', of returning to other measures of growth that transcend stagnancy, focused instead on quality of life.

"The shape of wisdom as well as self-worth has drastically changed,” he tells me at his office in Takadanobaba, north west Tokyo. "We can point to periods of change, the late 80s with Chernobyl, or early 90s with the end of the USSR and communism [the end of history, according to Francis Fukuyama], or the early 00s with September 11. And finally the early the early 10s, with March 11 and Fukushima Daiichi."

Kato sees our world as one of fundamental transition, from dreams of the infinite to realities of the finite – a transformation Japan grasps better than most of us. "I consider younger Japanese floating, shifting into a new qualified power, which can do and undo as well: can enjoy doing and not doing equally."

I ask him if Japan's model – stagnancy as strength – can inform the rest of the world, educate us in the possibilities of impoverishment?

"Imagine creating a robot that has the strength and delicacy to handle an egg," he says. “That robot has to have the skills to understand and not destroy that egg. This is the key concept for growing our ideas about growth into our managing of de-growth."

Handling that egg is tricky. A spike in youth volunteerism in Japan post 3/11 suggests that young Japanese, despite the global hand-wringing over their futures, are bypassing the old pathways to corporate success in favour of more humble participation.

by Roland Kelts, The Long+Short |  Read more:

Image: Keiko Shimoda

We'll All Eat Grasshoppers - Once We Know How to Raise Them

Go to any market in Mexico and you’ll see piles of grasshoppers—dusted with chile powder, roasted with garlic, sprinkled with lime juice. I’ve eaten grasshoppers ground up in salsas and semi-pulverized in micheladas, their intact legs floating in the refreshing mix of beer, lime juice, and hot sauce. If you’ve ever been served chile-dusted orange slices along with a shot of mezcal—surprise! That chile powder was actually ground up grasshoppers.

By now you’ve probably heard that entomophagy—insect eating—is in our dietary future, or at least should be. Put aside the yuck factor; insects are packed with protein, much less damaging to the environment than other livestock, and can even be killed humanely by popping them in the freezer. It’s all so crazy it just might work; the United Nations published a whole book in 2013 promoting edible insects as a solution to global food insecurity. With Earth looking down the barrel of a population of 9 billion humans, all of them hungry for protein, it makes sense to cultivate animals with 80 percent-edible bodies (crickets) instead of 40 percent (beef), and that don’t require 10 pounds of feed to get two pounds of meat (pigs). In theory.

In Mexico, that’s more than just an idea. With its longstanding tradition of eating grasshoppers—chapulines in Spanish—Mexico would seem perfectly poised to enter the coming age of entomophagy. (Ant eggs—escamoles—are another popular dish.) But there’s one problem: chapulines are expensive. They cost more than pork, or chicken, and sometimes as much as beef or shrimp. Far from being a distasteful last resort for people who don’t have the money for meat (think Snowpiercer), chapulines are an in-demand product more people wish they could afford. The problem isn’t that bugs are rare, obviously. A recent study led by René Cerritos, a biologist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, estimated that 350,000 tons of chapulines live on Mexican crops every year. But harvesting them is disorganized, often illicit, and just plain difficult. Only a few hundred tons of chapulines are collected for food annually, and from only a couple of regions in Mexico. Chapulines can be quite affordable if you manage to buy them close to where they are harvested, Cerritos says. But once middlemen get involved and the grasshoppers get shipped around the country, the price can as much as triple.

Some chapulín operations maintain their own fields of alfafa—the bug’s favorite food. But others fly completely under the radar, the catchers trespassing on whatever farms they can find. Chapulines are agricultural pests, so you’d think farmers would be happy to get rid of them. But the clandestine hunts can damage crops and pack down the earth in carefully managed fields, breeding ill will between famers and chapulín catchers instead of cooperation. In Oaxaca, for example, chapulín catchers gather before dawn on a farm—often without the farmer’s knowledge or permission—and run up and down the rows of crops, plucking chapulines from the plants one at a time. “That’s not an effective way to catch your lunch, let alone make an affordable product,” says Gabe Mott, co-founder of the company Aspire, which is working to develop insect culinary products in Mexico, Ghana, and the US. Just like the UN, Aspire thinks entomophagy can help address hunger and poor nutrition around the world; in 2013 the company won the Hult Prize, $1 million in start-up money to social entrepreneurship projects. But before Aspire or any other company can turn these bugs into a feature, edible insects are going to have to get cheaper.

by Lizzie Wade, Wired |  Read more:

Image: Getty

Grateful Dead

[ed. Bob Weir's probably one of just a few people in the world that can actually remember all the lyrics.]

Sara Friedlander, Restructured
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Gorillaz (feat. Ike Turner and MF Doom)

Ivy League Admissions Are a Sham: Confessions of a Harvard Gatekeeper

I graduated from Harvard in 2006, and have spent eight of the last nine years working as an admissions officer for my alma mater. A low-level volunteer, sure, but an official one all the same. I served as one of thousands of alumni volunteers around the world—a Regional Representative for my local Schools Committee, if you want to get technical. And, as a Regional Rep, my duties fell somewhere between Harvard recruiter and Harvard gatekeeper.

But now I'm done with all that. For a long time, I believed in the admissions process. I thought that I could use my position to help regular smart people with great test scores and impressive extracurriculars break into an elitist system. After eight years, though, I've learned that modest goal is more or less unreachable. Ivy League admissions are a complete racket, rigged in favor of the privileged and completely impervious to change. So I'm quitting the business.

And because I'm quitting, that means I can tell you, the reader, all the secrets of being a Harvard admissions representative, and what it really takes to get in. (...)

Every single applicant to Harvard is supposed to get an interview. My most recent regional committee had about a hundred active interviewers for three hundred applicants every year. The others where I worked have had closer to two hundred interviewers for nearly a thousand applicants. So everyone could expect between three to six interviews per person per year, split between the fall (early action) and winter (regular applications).

Each of these interviews lasted for about an hour of in-person time. To prep, I would contact the applicant for their basic info: GPA, test scores, and any additional material they want to send. Most people sent me a resume and a sample application essay or two. Toward the end of my tenure, I also started to see more exotic types of supplements: headshots, scripts and short stories, musical recordings.

The end goal of each interview was to rate the prospective in each of three areas: academics, extracurriculars, and personal qualities, plus an overall rating to judge the candidate's overall "suitability for admission." These ratings were "absolutely superior," "strong candidate," "acceptable but perhaps not competitive," or "not recommended."

But distilling a developing young mind into four numbers was an impossibly cruel task. And an increasingly difficult one. They were there to be evaluated for one of the most important opportunities of their lives. How could you possibly hope to get at the genuine person when there's so much pressure?

Which is why the interview process has devolved into more of a pageant.

First, in the purest sense. Seven years ago, most students would opt to wear something dressy but tasteful to the interview. In the last two years, though, I've seen the entire spectrum of fashion paraded in front of me. From the students who opt for shutter shades and muscle T's to the ones who wear bow ties and (exactly once) Louboutin pumps.

After the formalwear portion of the evening, we moved on to Q&A. Which was where each candidate launched into their prepared speech to show that they personally bucked the popular image of the Millennial as a smartphone-obsessed, Ritalin-addicted egomaniac with no work ethic. In fact, they mostly went on to question whether such people even existed outside the minds of East Coast media commentators. Sure, each of them liked their iPhones and maybe they did struggle a bit to understand other people's worldviews, but that's also why they needed to take that trip to Tanzania or volunteer for Habitat for Humanity or take a field trip to an inner city school or…

by Anonymous, Gawker |  Read more:

Image: Jim Cooke

Amy Bennett, Losing it, 2006.
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Bob Marley, Mick Jagger, Peter Tosh. New York City, 1978.
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