By Ryan Sayre

I really can’t think of a better example of what we might call an anthropological ethos of urgency than a roadside postbox in the time of war. During the OAS terrorist campaigns in Algeria in the 1960s, a foreign journalist turns to a colleague with this story:

“I remember asking another Japanese reporter how he managed to file his stories. “I send many by post,“ he said. “Mine are not urgent news stories.“ As he talked, he pointed to a letterbox outside the Aletti Hotel, which, he told me, he always used. A sticker, in French, on the box, read: “Do not post letters here. Owing to the circumstances, collections have been discontinued since February 12.“ We were in May.

The anthropologist offering this anecdote gives it as a brief interlude of humor, a gentle ribbing of the journalistic field, a little snatch of good-humored racism. I wonder, however, whether, just for shits and giggles, we might hold our laughter for a moment and try taking the Japanese reporter at his word? What I mean is, let's just assume for a moment that he means what he says about the non-urgency of his dispatches. Let’s assume he parles French like a Bonaparte, has a semiotician’s eye for signage, and makes use of this out-of-service postbox for no reason other than that it strikes him as the most suitable place to store observations on a situation too liquid to be touched in the immediate present. The postbox in which our reporter stuffs his dispatches is a kind of time capsule, yes, but rather than the tin boxes we buried as children that wait idly for the arrival of some pre-established future date, these dispatches are attentively listening, devoting themselves to the moment when the ping of empty copper shell casings gives over to the jingle of a mailman’s steel keyring.

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By Meghan Rosen

Earlier this year, California became one of 48 states to legally allow the sale and use of the fumigant pesticide methyl iodide. Methyl iodide is the proposed replacement for methyl bromide, a chemical widely used in California’s production of conventional strawberries. (If you’ve ever driven by fields with rows and rows of tightly stretched black tarps, you may have already seen the fumigation process at work: a few weeks before planting, methyl bromide is pumped into the soil and sealed in with thick plastic sheets. It’s colorless, odorless, and highly toxic; within days the gas can wipe out thriving populations of microorganisms, insects, and weeds — effectively sterilizing the soil.)

As the nation’s largest producer of strawberries (nearly 90% are grown in California), any decision to overhaul pest control is big, time-consuming, and subject to massive environmental and toxicological review. So, why the switch? According to the EPA, methyl bromide is a significant ozone depleting substance. In California, where nearly 40,000 acres are devoted solely to strawberry growth (only 4% is organic) and ~200 pounds of methyl bromide are applied per acre, the potential for environmental impact is huge. (The EPA estimates that 50-95% of the noxious gas escapes during fumigation or is released into the environment when the plastic tarps are removed.)

In 1988, the United States ratified the Montreal Protocol, an international treaty intended to curb use of ozone-depleting substances like methyl bromide. One goal was to completely phase out methyl bromide by 2005, with the exception of ‘critical use exemptions’ for farmers who absolutely depended on the chemical for pest control.

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by James McGirk

When I heard the Federal Bureau of Investigation might have figured out the identity of seventies skyjacker D.B. Cooper I was really upset. Who among us hasn’t felt a smidge of sympathy for the outlaw? Well into my thirties, having finally completed my education and finding myself without short-term goals to strive for, a swelling waistline, and an unremarkable life unspooling before me, I can’t help but feel attracted to a life fueled by passion and brightened with sparks of decisive action, like leaping out the back of a Boeing 727 into a lightning storm.

Actual crime is out of the question. I don’t want to hurt anybody, and my muscles have atrophied to the point were the thought of taking real life action is ludicrous, but as the dudgeon of white-collar work corrodes my body and seeps into my interior life I wonder whether there might be a way to fight back. Could living a life devoted to darkness and negativity act as a tonic, at least until the demon flows of testosterone ebb away?

What pushed me over the edge was reading “An Investment Manager’s View on the Top 1%,” an anonymous and possibly apocryphal investment manager’s account of his wealthy clients, written for the University of California Santa Cruz’s Who Rules America blog. In the United States an increasingly disproportionate fraction of the country’s wealth has accumulated in the richest sectors of society. The disparity itself wasn’t news to me, but I had never really considered what was inside of that top one percent.

Before reading the article, reaching that top percentile seemed like a feasible goal to me. I took it for granted that because I have degrees from snooty schools (granted both are in Writing, but I could always go back for a JD), reaching the highest echelons of society, i.e. making the required annual salary of $300K and accumulating a net worth of $1.2mm, seemed like realistic option to me. With a few years of hard work and a nice suit I thought access to the levers of society could be mine.

Turns out the top percentile is more spike than a plateau. The bottom half “largely include[s] physicians, attorneys, upper middle management, and small business people who have done well,” says the anonymous investment manager. “Most of those in the bottom half…lack power and global flexibility and are essentially well-compensated workhorses for the top 0.5%, just like the bottom 99%.”

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It’s depressing that I even know this, we say, sighing. The names of Charlie Sheen’s ex wives and goddesses, the nature of Wiener's tweets, or, until recently, what’s on Steve Buscemi’s stoop. But maybe we should just give up on wincing. We all love a good story, after all, just not always when it’s about us.

Earl Morris’ film Tabloid is about this. In his excavation of – or perhaps that’s too deep a word – of the “case of the manacled Mormon”, Morris has done his, as he tweeted, “level-headed best to capture what Joyce” McKinney, a vivacious Southern blonde who apparently kidnapped her ex-boyfriend Kirk Anderson, a Mormon, tied him to a bed and forced him to have sex in a Devonshire cabin for a weekend in 1977, “believed happened.”

The British press of course could not resist this story and McKinney’s self described “Kodak moment,” what she calls her innocent attempt to rescue the man she loved from the “cult” of Mormonism, became fodder for a bit of a tabloid war between the Daily Express, the Mirror, and others. The former took her side, that a great passion had been crushed by the brainwashing Mormon church, while the latter took the time to dig up her nude bondage photos, running a new one on the cover every day for a week.

When McKinney, vivacious and arresting even now, was released on bail, “the sky lit up with flashbulbs – I was a celebrity.” She met Keith Moon at a party, had some glamorous fun. But then, as she tells it, the nude pictures came out, she was slandered, and then jumped bail and fled to the United States – disguised as a deaf mute on a false passport, of course.

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By Maniza Naqvi

“Have I over egged the pudding?”

The room had become so silent that she thought she heard her thumb nail chip as she rubbed it anxiously against the lectern.

“No, really, have I?” A faint apology in her disarming tone as she searched the vast auditorium and tossed her freshly tinted red mane towards one shoulder and with her forefinger brushed aside a stray bang of wispy curls from her forehead and out of her eyes. She had taken extra care of her makeup this morning—a more golden glow a thicker mascara.

It would, to a sentence have been a cliché, if she had been asked to write how she felt about being here. The runners at dawn, the vast landscape, all golden elephant grass and table top mountains—that one acacia tree on the horizon—the constant summarizing of what it was like—well—like, like, that film of course with Robert Redford and Meryl Streep—-isn’t it, and oh the macchiatos, the finding oneself-and of course finding the proverbial soul mate—rugged, the face of a lion—yes but of course—and always never black—the realization that this was the source of the beginning of time—-and of religion.

She would have written the speech, of course she would’ve had she known that she was to deliver one. But instead she had been asked at the last moment to give the closing statement for the conference, to fill in for the Chair, who was sick this morning. Food was blamed as always, though it was probably drink from the party last night, as always.

Was it the quote from Slavoj Zizek and the mention of the leather and zip masks in Alexander McQueen’s Savage Beauty exhibit at the Met? It was meant to be an icebreaker to help her with her extreme anxiety for public speaking.

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View from Marais Window: Footprints in the Snow, 2005, copyright Alison Harris

by Elatia Harris

In 1986, San Francisco-born David Downie, a scholar and multilingual translator, moved to Paris, into a real garret — a maid's room, in fact — to write himself into another way of life. Fresh from Milan, his marriage to a Milanese finished, he was still young enough for years more of getting it right. A quarter century later, his authority on matters Parisian is acknowledged by Jan Morris, Diane Johnson, and Mavis Gallant, to name only a few illustrious admirers.

To the intense delight of his readers, Paris, Paris: A Journey Into the City of Light, was reissued last April. Another book, Quiet Corners of Rome, came out in May. Rome is a noisy place, but David Downie and his wife, the photographer Alison Harris, rearrange that for us. Alison's ravishing photos of Paris and Rome are taken from these two books, and from an archive of images not otherwise available.

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by Alyssa Pelish

Robinson Crusoe is notable for a lot of reasons. It was one of the first English novels. It brings up stuff like cultural relativism and morality and providence with a capital P. Marx favorably critiqued its depiction of pre-capitalist man. It can be read as a big old allegory of British colonialism. And, of course, it’s the locus classicus of desert island tropes. Yet when I finally got around to reading it this summer, it recalled to me nothing so much as the contentment I’d felt at age eight-ish, sheltering in a makeshift lean-to of blankets and card table chairs as I shined a flashlight over the pages of another, though not entirely different, book.

Reading Robinson Crusoe, I found myself happily engrossed in Crusoe’s construction of his island dwelling — how he begins to hollow out a rock aside a hill and fashions a tented enclosure from the sails of his battered ship. He recounts how, upon having carved out a cave sufficient for himself, “into this fence or fortress…I carried all my riches, all my provisions, ammunition, and stores.” Contentedly, I read as Crusoe burrowed further into his cave, carving out numerous alcoves and crannies for storage and hiding. I read as he built up a barricade of turf around the cave, as he raised rafters from wall to cave entrance, thatching them with tree boughs. And, finally, I read how, after pulling in after himself the ladder he has crafted for the entrance to his cave, he declares himself “fortified…from all the world.”

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For a crash course in the tactics of persuasion, you can’t do much better than religion. Religious rhetoric is thick with arguments that win people over despite being logically flawed. Just a few of the most common:

Atheists, skeptics, and rationalists complain about arguments like these, and rightfully so. None of the above constitutes good evidence for the existence of a God. But there’s a reason religions use those appeals to authority, consequences, and fear — they work. The unfortunate truth is that people seem to be more susceptible to certain irrational arguments than they are to rational ones, which raises a troubling question for those of us who would like to combat false beliefs in society: Should we make the argument that constitutes the best evidence for the true claim, or the argument that’s most likely to persuade the person we’re talking to?

To be clear, I’m not talking about lying. I’m talking about making an argument which is true but which isn’t good evidence for the claim you’re trying to advance. So for example, let’s say I wanted to convince a Catholic of the truth of the theory of evolution. My first instinct might be to lay out the evidence for the theory, showing them examples of natural selection at work, pointing to examples of transitional fossils, and so on. If my goal is to change their belief, however, I’d probably be better off explaining that the Vatican’s position is that evolution is consistent with Catholic dogma. That appeal to authority is going to be more persuasive, for someone who already trusts the authority in question, than an appeal to the relevant evidence.

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by Kevin Baldwin

Though Darwin is best known for his theory of natural selection (1859), another contribution he made to biology was his recognition of coevolution and symbiosis (living together). Nature was more than simply “red in tooth and claw” (Tennyson 1849): Organisms not only compete, but can cooperate with each other to achieve new capabilities. One of Darwin's most famous inferences was that a newly discovered African orchid with a foot long corolla (!) must have a moth pollinator with a similarly long tongue (Darwin 1862). This moth was soon discovered and given the subspecies name praedicta, to indicate its prophesied existence.

Life abounds with examples of cooperation despite our preoccupation with competition and predation. Eukaryotes are much larger and more complex than the bacteria from which they evolved. They originated when large bacteria engulfed smaller ones that provided sugars (derived from photosynthesis) or high energy phosphate compounds in return for shelter in the larger bodies of their hosts. This event, called the endosymbiotic origin of eukaryotes is one of the most important transitions in the history of life. Lichens are a symbiosis of a photosynthetic algae and a nutrient scavenging fungus, which by themselves would not be terribly successful, but together can live in some of the most inhospitable places imaginable. The coevolution of flowering plants and pollinators is well known (see above). Floral nectar and pollen are traded for pollination services by insects, birds, and bats.

Reef building corals are basically tiny sea anemones that harbor symbiotic photosynthetic algae that trade their sugar production for nitrogenous waste produced by the coral host. Sugar is a source of energy that is exchanged for Nitrogen, an important component of proteins. This cooperation enables corals to have the high rates of calcium carbonate deposition necessary for healthy, growing reefs.

Recent molecular analyses tell us that the gene that directs coral exoskeletal development is the same one that directs human skeletal development! This deep homology indicates that corals and humans share a common ancestor from over half a billion years ago. The expanses of time and evolutionary change that separate us may make corals seem remote, but to me it is amazing and humbling to contemplate that relationship.

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by Dave Munger

A typical conversation about money with my stepbrother goes something like this: I ask how things are going, then he tells me something that has gone wrong. His TV is broken. One of his teeth is disintegrating and he needs to go the the dentist, but it's not covered by Medicare. Mark's small income from Social Security Disability barely covers his mortgage, food, gas, and the fixed utility bills he must pay every month. Whenever anything unexpected occurs, it's a crisis.

It's a crisis for me, too. I give him some extra money each month to help with the inevitable unexpected expenses and to put into repairing his flood-damaged home. But it's never enough. So when Mark mentions a problem that this regular income can't cover, it's an awkward moment for both of us. Mark doesn't want to ask me for additional help; he thinks I'm doing enough already. I want to help, but I'm not made of money, and my wife and I must balance our financial decisions about Mark with other needs, including putting two kids through college.

So I tell Mark that he should go to the dentist and not worry about the money; I'll cover it. But I don't say anything about the TV. I feel terrible that he doesn't have a working TV; he's isolated enough as it is, but clearly that's not as important as the teeth, right? Or is it? Maybe I should just write him a check and let him decide how to spend it. But what if the check doesn't even cover the dental expense?

Mark tells me everything is getting more expensive and his money doesn't go as far as it once did. He hasn't gotten a raise in his disability payments for two years — and I haven't increased the amount I'm sending him either. Mark doesn't buy the reasoning of my column from a few months back, where I point out that while prices haven't increased much in recent years, they have increased more for people like him.

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by Sarah Firisen

Summer; a time of fun in the sun, but it's also often a time of transition, particularly for children. They learn how to swim; they go away to summer camp for the first time; they often have growth spurts in the 3 months they're off and you find in the week before school starts that none of their clothes fit them anymore. I definitely think that summer vacations are far too long in the US and would love to see, if not year round schooling, at least a schedule that is more in line with Europe: something like mid July until the end of August. But, given that caveat, I do find it interesting to watch my children take these leaps in physical, emotional and social maturity over these long months of trying out different activities and visiting far flung locations away from their everyday lives and normal companions.

This summer, the metamorphosis has been particularly dramatic for my oldest daughter Anya, who, at 11, was a confirmed tomboy (or so we all thought.) I started having some inkling that something was going on when she asked me to buy her some makeup. I had previously told her that, if she was ever interested in wearing makeup, I would take her to buy something natural-looking to dissuade her from going the heavy black or blue eyeliner route. I didn't actually expect her to take me up on the offer anytime soon. But she did. We went to Sephora and she emerged the proud owner of a shimmery brown eye shadow, clear mascara, clear lip gloss and perfume. There was method to my madness: I have been trying to encourage her to clean her face twice a day (she is starting to develop pimples) and to use deodorant on a daily basis. I told her that she could only wear the makeup if she cleaned her face and the perfume if she used the deodorant and showered more regularly. My expectation was that she would wear the makeup a couple of times and then the novelty would wear off. Well, it's now been over 6 weeks and she carefully applies it almost most mornings. You could hardly tell that she has it on, but she knows.

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by Joy Icayan

The Philippine local version of Big Brother, Pinoy Big Brother, featured the cringe-worthy circumcision of an eighteen year old Filipino Italian boy. Perhaps less cringe-worthy, although quite fascinating was the other housemates’ (and audience’s) shock that they were living in a house with an uncircumcised teen, and then the support, thinly veiled in condescension, for the boy undergoing the procedure. Circumcision is a primary ritual for Filipino boys, normally done before the child enters high school. The endurance of pain becomes symbolic for entry into manhood and the boy’s readiness to engage in sex.

This ritual is succeeded with the loss of virginity and subsequent sexual conquests, rituals of brotherhood and friendships, courtship and marriage. Missing one of these often leads to ridicule from peers. In the same fashion, boys who eschew sexual relations with girls or women are derided as either being homosexuals or being torpe, a term for male shyness which usually translates to being a sissy.

Rituals are defined by intersections of the institutions of the Catholic Church, the family and the school. Catholic education, prevalent especially in private schools set stringent rules on behaviors and future roles. The story of Adam and Eve poses the traditional view of man’s greatest failure—a woman, as a sort of moral warning. My generation and those who came before us grew up with specialized home education activities for boys and girls, with boys doing carpentry and woodwork and girls doing knitting, cooking and cleaning. Local metaphors regarding home often illustrate perceptions of men versus women. Until recently textbooks defined fathers as the ‘haligi ng tahanan’ (foundations of the home) and mothers as ‘ilaw ng tahanan’ (light of the home). Mothers are expected to provide warmth and nurturance, but it is the fathers’ role to keep the family as a whole.

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by Azra Raza

According to every convention, my friend Ifti was all wrong. He was born at the wrong time. He should have been born in 2150. He was born in the wrong country. He should have been born in Hollywood. He was born to the wrong parents. He should have been Tallulah Bankhead’s child. He was born to the wrong siblings. He should have been my sister. He was born in the wrong body. He should have been Marilyn Monroe. He was born to the wrong friends in Pakistan. His friends should have been Oscar Wilde, Dorothy Parker, Joan Crawford, Tennessee Williams, and Bette Davis. He was born to lead a life of luxury, dividing his time between the French Riviera and throwing extravagant parties in Manhattan. Instead he became a car salesman.

And if he had to become a car salesman, he should have been wearing the conventional salesman’s clothing. Ifti wore silks and brocades. He should have cinched his best car deals by groveling in front of clients. Instead, he succeeded by sassily telling Oprah Winfrey when she asked him how big the engine of the Mercedes was, “Are you going to sleep with it?” And when Mary Anne Childers asked him to open the trunk of the car she was buying from him, he famously remarked, “Honey, do it yourself, I just got my nails done.”

And while other salesmen were attending classes to polish up their PR skills, Ifti was busy being a gay activist. He created SANGAT, the organization devoted to Gays and Lesbians of South Asian origin. And why couldn’t SANGAT be content with their periodic display of solidarity by marching through town in the Annual Gay and Lesbian Pride Day Parade? Instead, Ifti raised funds to hire lawyers who have successfully fought cases to earn Immigration status for individuals seeking asylum because of their sexual preferences. And why did I regularly meet strangers in Ifti’s home who had found sanctuary in his ever-welcoming apartment?

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by Michael Blim

The goose that lays golden eggs has been considered a most valuable possession. But even more profitable is the privilege of taking the golden eggs laid by somebody else’s goose. The investment bankers and their associates now enjoy that privilege. They control the people through the people’s own money.

–Louis Brandeis, Other People’s Money and How the Bankers Use It (1914)

While the national debt struggle is getting the headlines, the bankers’ lobbyists in the backrooms of the Capitol are trying to undo the Dodd-Frank Act. It is a full-out assault ranging from trying to water down and if possible eliminate statute-mandated regulations to getting Republican members of Congress to chop big chunks off the budgets of the agencies that are trying to implement and enforce the new law. Taking Elizabeth Warren’s head was thrown in for good measure, and there were whispers that the President’s praetorian guard did not lament the passing of the President’s “dear friend.”

Almost a hundred years ago, Louis Brandeis and other progressive reformers were trying to break the hold the banks had on the American economy. Big bank power was near absolute, and their regard for government power scant. After Theodore Roosevelt in 1902 had sued to break up J.P. Morgan’s Northern Securities railroad trust, Morgan called on the President at the White House. “If we have done something wrong,” he said, “send your man to my man and they can fix it up.” Roosevelt refused, reflecting:

“That is a most illuminating illustration of the Wall Street point of view. Mr. Morgan could not help regarding me as a big rival operator who either intended to ruin all his interests or else could be induced to come to an agreement to ruin none.” (W.H. Brands, American Colossus, 2010, 547)

Not much has changed. The Wall Street moguls still don't take much guff from Presidents. Why should they? After the 2008 crash, the federal government bailed out the big banks, bent anti-trust rules to allow them to absorb competitors and increase market share, all the while the banks waged war to escape regulation, paid mind-boggling bonuses once again, and stiffed the very mortgage borrowers whom they ripped off and are now repossessing.

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by Quinn O'Neill

In a recent article for Big Think, David Ropeik argues that the risk posed by unvaccinated people is sufficient to justify coercing them into vaccinating. Measles is a potentially deadly disease and outbreaks are occurring due to declining vaccination rates, he reasons. “What does society do when one person’s behavior puts the greater community at risk? […] We make them stop.” I suppose it depends on the behavior and the degree of risk, but where vaccination is concerned, I disagree that coercive measures are warranted. While measles is not a fun disease and it can kill people, the sacrifice of individual autonomy isn't justified in this case.

The risk of getting the measles in the US is very low.

Between 2001 and 2010, the US saw 692 cases. 292 of these were imported by travelers who caught the disease in another country. Since you can't blame your unvaccinated compatriots if you catch the measles in another country, we'll exclude these. That leaves 400 cases in 10 years out of approximately 297 million people. The odds of getting the measles in the US in a typical year are thus 0.13 in a million. Given that about 10% of the population is unvaccinated, the odds of an unvaccinated person getting the disease are about 1.3 in a million.¹ Note that the odds are higher for the unvaccinated, but 1.3 in a million is still extremely rare.

Of course, the risk is undoubtedly higher this year since there were over 150 cases reported by the end of June. However, the majority of these were foreign visitors and US residents who caught the disease abroad. Assuming half of these cases were acquired in the US and that current trends continue until year end, we could expect the odds of an unvaccinated person getting the measles this year to be about 4.9 in a million (150 in 30.9 million). These are pretty slim odds, measly even.

People often argue that it isn’t those who refuse vaccination they’re worried about, but those who are too young to be vaccinated, typically those under a year of age. About 15% of measles cases reported in the first half of this year affected children in this age group. This could end up being as many as 23 infants by year end (again using 150 as an estimate for the year total). So the chances of a child under age one getting the measles this year would be about 5.3 in a million.² To put this risk in perspective, these odds are about the same as the odds of dying from a fall down the stairs (5 in a million).³ Odds of dying from the measles are less than 1 in 1000 cases. So the odds of an infant getting the measles in the US and dying as a result are about 5.3 in a billion. Panic is not in order.

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Band of Saints

still in his garden
light
he apologized to his sunflowers

promising things would
change
he swore by all that’s right

that he would end his
war
with the earth that brings them forth

on stalks thick as
thieves
upon which bright heads

turn from north
leaves
open as palms of supplicating hands

in rows of six foot stems a
wall
dense as the barnside to the east

its shadow pall upon baptisia
space
and soil each umber face and corolla

together a mute coro de oro
true
as a band of saints to whom he

genuflects and greets
.

by Jim Culleny, 7/18/11