by Colin Marshall

On its surface, Night on Earth is nothing but people talking in taxicabs. The untold production hassle involved in this supposedly simple setup — towing gear, elaborate car-mounted lighting, routes to be driven and re-driven with each and every take — represents a truth about pretty much every Jim Jarmusch film: what doesn’t look like much in one sense turns out, in others, to actually be quite a lot. This holds especially true for for his choppier black-and-white pictures of the 1980s which, to the untrained eye, offered little more than slouchy characters walking, running, and standing around. Night on Earth is substantially glossier, in its own way, than those early projects, but it also manages to be more accessible than the even slicker productions that would follow. Purists might argue that, as penance, the movie has wound up as one of Jarmusch’s least seen; purists might argue that, but I won’t.

Whether intentionally or accidentally, Night on Earth proves difficult to write about without digging in the mothballs for a set of clichés tiring even to ponder. Taxicab stories force the lazy critic’s hand: if you don’t talk about the liminal state — the “non-place” — of such a temporary, disposable, rattly means of transit, you’ll probably talk about the distinctive short-term commercio-social dynamic between rider and driver. This is safer territory for a filmmaker like Jarmusch, whose deadly allergy to cliché demands that, for his own safety, he keep these risk factors at a distance. I assume the all-knowing, cigarette-bottomed, somehow unironically ironic deadpan stare of the 1970s NYC hipster by way of Akron scares them, as it would you or I.

Nevertheless, the forces of temperance seem to have come down just slightly harder on this film than on the rest of the Jarmusch canon. I consider it modern cinema’s loss, however slight, that Night on Earth lost its original title, Losangelesnewyorkparisromehelsinki. That word search, which contains the film’s five locations, wields the advantage of specificity, not to mention truth in advertising. Night, sure. Earth? Well, America’s biggest coastal cities, the two most romanticized ones in continental Europe, and one in, uh, Finland. It’s a point both for and against the movie that you wonder if Buenos Aires, Bombay, or Tokyo lay buried on a cutting room floor somewhere.

Each darkened city has its own cab, its own driver, and its own passengers; these form separate segments that, happily, share nothing else. It would have taken a certain art to tie all these vignettes together with common characters, incidents, or structures, but that’s not Jarmusch’s art. On the broadest level, each scene is about a different relationship between a cabbie and their fares, but these relationships are different enough that, in saying that, I’m not saying much of anything. Do I get any closer to the truth with the claim that that, in all five cities, Jarmusch harnesses the rich, creatively nourishing randomness generated by the matching of people in need of a ride with drivers in need of about fifteen bucks?

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Michael Blim

Suddenly the blue below turns to white and gray. We pass over the last of Lake Michigan and begin our descent into O’Hare, crisscrossing the orderly Chicago street grid, former corn farm townships since divided into smaller squares still, each comprising a family or two. Past the countless brown lawns, now covered with snow we go, skidding just a bit on the tarmac where little ice flows glow in the landing lights.

My parents’ house is about six miles from the airport. We may have passed above it, but one square looks like every other at a couple of thousand feet. I had tried in vain to find the expressway junctures, but like houses from above, every cloverleaf looks like every other too. Even a big, but rare patch of forest preserves, an odd and invented site on the prairie, doesn’t help me figure where we were or what I might have seen.

Best to have stuck with “white and gray.” Topography is destiny, if only for this trip to America’s self-proclaimed heartland.

Wherever I go, I read newspapers, as many as I can find and even in languages I don’t know. It’s true that the papers in unknown languages are like those infernal English crosswords, number and nameless, and for me thus clueless. Still I hope that I’ll pick up something, remembering even now my one great coup when marooned on an Adriatic island I deduced from Croatian that Sadam Hussein had invaded Kuwait. Compulsions, it seems, require little reinforcement.

My father gets two papers at home, the Daily Herald, a town daily, and the Chicago Tribune. Giving my mother’s advancing Alzheimer’s disease, he only has time now to glance at them, choosing the editorials and op-ed pages over the rest. To me, it’s like he eats the wrong part of the chicken. I have plenty of opinions and a low opinion of the opinions of others. I prefer the facts, such as they are.

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The first of these spontaneously popped into my mind as I regained consciousness after some recent shoulder surgery. As the effects of anaesthesia wore off and before the pain became a roar which drowned out every other thought, I made up the rest in the ultimately futile attempt at distracting myself:

1. Send not to know why the bell is ringing. Curiosity has killed many a “cat,” and you could be next.
2. The biggest philosophical problem is suicide, thought Camus. He died young in a traffic accident and as far as I know, no one thinks that that is a philosophical problem.
3. Time is money, which cannot buy happiness, which is why the leisurely and rich are always so sad.
4. I am told, and I have no reason to doubt it, that it is better to have a bird in one's hand than not to.
5. If you don't really believe in God and then say, “God does not play dice,” it is a bit like saying, “Unicorns don't speak French,” isn't it?
6. I firmly believe it is better to say “never” late than never ever to say it.
7. “A picture is worth a thousand words” is an easy way to remember that a trillion pictures are worth a quadrillion words.
8. Who let the cats out of the bags? Who? Who, who?
9. If you have a terminal illness then consider Einstein's profound words to the effect that the Lord is subtle but not malicious. Try to imagine what you'd have if the Lord were malicious. Hopefully you will feel better.

Micrograffiti is a project edited by Stacey Swann for The Owls site. The writers were asked to respond with fiction to Ben Walters’ photographs of the South London graffiti tunnel. Editor's Note: These two writers responded to the same image but interpreted the text of the tag differently, one reading it as “we live to learn now to love” and the other reading it as “we live to learn how to love.” -S.S.

*

we live to learn now to love

By Stefany Anne Golberg

He had been staring at that wall for like, he didn’t know, a half hour? It was a stupid phrase. The stupidest phrase he had ever seen, just like that, spray painted on a wall. It was the kind of phrase that aimed to sell you something, but he couldn’t think what. Ice cream maybe, or lady products. Anyway, he had to get going.

What can you say to such a stupid phrase? How can you just write that, out there for everyone to look at? Someone must be really embarrassed. Anyone who writes something like that only wants one thing. And then they had to go and paint a heart in the middle.

He took off his hat and sat down on the ground. He really had to get going too.

we live to Learn ♥ how to Love

By Sean Hill

An ocean and half the country away from Bemidji, Minnesota, this bit of graffiti. It takes me back to that Sunday night in the Hard Times Saloon. You’re out of town on business. I’m beginning to feel lonely and hungry. The saloon is open late and in walking distance, and I want a beer to go with the wings I will order. The guy on the barstool to my left props his forearm against the bar, and holds his right hand in the air—swollen, oozing blood—clearly busted. After a couple wings and sips, “What happened?”

“Got into a fight with my girlfriend; she made me mad. You know, it’s not right to hit a woman.”

“Yeah.”

“I took a walk instead, but when I got to the corner I punched the Stop sign. So I came down here for some beers.”

“I see.”

“She made me mad, but I didn’t hurt something that’s alive.”

“Right.” We talk some more while I finish the wings and another beer. He seems like a nice guy; I worry about his hand. I walk home stopping at every Stop sign, in no hurry because you’re not there.

*

Stefany Anne Golberg (“we live to learn now to love”) is a founder of the nascent Huckleberry Explorer's Club and writes for The Smart Set.

Sean Hill (“we live to Learn ♥ how to Love”), author of the poetry collection Blood Ties & Brown Liquor, lives in Bemidji, Minnesota, the first city on the Mississippi River and home to Paul Bunyan and Babe the blue ox.

The Owls site is for digital writing and art projects. Cross-posts appear here by the generosity of 3QD. You can receive updates from The Owls via free email subscriptions on the site's main page.

Can nonexistence be a saleable commodity? Can the free market establish its price? Two stories for your consideration: A public bid to dismantle a rock and roll band, and a Beverly Hills company that will invest in your divorce.

Breakup checks

An annoyed guy in Seattle tried to raise $10 million, to be given to the rock band Weezer if its members agree to immediately and permanently break up. Why? Angry Internet Dude (his name is James Burns) said he didn't think Weezer's fans liked any of their new albums.

“This is an abusive relationship,” he said, “and it needs to stop now.”

“Every year, Rivers Cuomo swears that he's changed, and that their new album is the best thing that he's done since Pinkerton, and what happens? Another pile of crap like 'Beverly Hills' or 'I'm Your Daddy'.”

But his main grievance wasn't aesthetic: it was attentional. “If we reach at least $10,000,000,” his pitch said, “then we get a chance to possibly stop hearing about a shitty new Weezer album every goddamn year.” It was a joke, of course, as Burns felt obliged to explain: “I figured since the internet wasted so much of my time with all the ridiculous articles about the new Weezer album, I thought I’d return the favor and waste some of the internet’s time.”

Attention Surplus Disorder

He didn't collect much money, but the campaign was a media smash. It went viral because it was pretty funny – not very nice to the guys in Weezer, but still funny – and no doubt because people are sick and tired of certain ideas and topics being forced into their attentional space. The campaign inverted the typical Internet economic model: Instead of paying to grab an audience's attention, the audience was paying to take it back. It's like a hostage negotiation, with attention the kidnap victim and $10 million the ransom.

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ABP is a house; it is one quarter of a house, the bottom left corner of New Haven’s 111 Howe Street to be precise. ABP is short for Alif, Bay and Pay which are the first three alphabets of the Urdu language. It has been given the name ABP by the three Pakistani undergraduates from Yale University who live there. A name only the friends of the inhabitants know. Three Pakistani undergrads live there but, more importantly, every Pakistani at Yale (and many non-Yale ones) have been in this decadent den to sleep, eat, get help with their Math problem sets, play HALO and watch life pass by. You must understand that ABP is a house full of Pakistanis, and specifically, Pakistani men.

ABP is located on the piece of Howe Street that falls between Elm Street and Edgewood Avenue. Howe Street is an enigma. It is one of those roads that fall on the very boundary between Yale and New Haven. And you can see New Haven’s culture diffusing into Yale’s pretentious Gothic around this point. This is a place where people become darker, don’t wear polo shirts, smoke cheap cigarettes and hang out around gas stations rather than libraries. ABP is right around the corner from Main Garden, Elm Street’s worst Chinese restaurant. It is one of those grubby little affairs whose dirty kitchen you can see through a side door that is permanently open to the street and where nobody speaks English nor does anyone make authentic Chinese food. Everybody is trying to find their own homes and their own identities on Howe Street: two Chinese brothers behind the counter, a few black men near the gas station and a bunch of Pakistanis in an American house.

Once you arrive at ABP you realize that like any respectable counterculture house the proper entrance is at the back. The house has three bedrooms on the ground floor and a common room and a kitchen in the basement. The common room is the place that holds the house together. It has three couches and a table in the middle, cluttered with fast food leftovers, math textbooks, Xbox remote controllers and BlackBerrys. On certain days, the table is cleared to play poker. The couches, all of different sizes and providing different comfort levels, are booked early in the day by people sleeping over. There is a large television facing the table and the couches which is exclusively used to watch cricket and to play HALO. The common room is always slightly dark and very loud. The kitchen is always dirty and never used. Unlike the basement, the upstairs is not a communal space. White broken stairs lead you to a narrow corridor and three very different bedrooms. The first room belongs to Muneeb, more commonly known as Bubbles or Bubbz, and is in total disarray. Muneeb, a generously proportioned guy, is the primary sight of the room and there is not much else to see but litter. The second room belongs to Oosman and serves as the second common room. The third room belongs to Owais, who is the eldest and most religious. His room is meticulously ordered and decorated by calligraphy posters with quotations from the Quran hung on the walls. This is the room you go to find useful but rare things like nail cutters, old textbooks, spare sandals and good advice.

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Cold Sting

Last night under a full moon
with a threat of frost
we threw row covers over the kale

We stumbled from a pile near the tracks
with bins of river rocks
to weigh the covers down

Wind waved their white lightness
over the Red Russian and Lacinato
as if we were flagging Nature,
signaling Ok, ok, you win again

We laughed and mocked ourselves
for hauling stones so late in the day
in a black plastic bin among full-mooncast-shades
stumbling over clods of autumn-tilled rows
covering kale to save ourselves and the stuff of soup
from the cold sting of this newest
turn of the earth

by Jim Culleny,
November 2010

The day Tariq Ramadan came to the university to speak, I had just been teaching my social anthropology class about the contradictions between the ethical and pragmatic aspects of Islam. How can people claim Islam is egalitarian when Muslims around the world use religion to justify intolerance and patriarchy? I hadn’t been thinking about Ramadan, the Swiss philosopher and Islamic scholar who is the grandson of Hassan al Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, but since he was here and would be speaking about tolerance in Islam, I asked my students to go listen to him. Ramadan’s father was exiled to Switzerland, so Ramadan grew up in the European intellectual tradition, studying Islam at both the University of Geneva and Al-Azhar University in Cairo. After years of being denied a visa by the United States government, losing him a position at Notre Dame University, and after a challenge that worked its way through numerous courts, Ramadan was finally able to come to the US this year.

Ramadan is a lean man with receding gray hair, a closely trimmed beard and burning eyes, a charismatic figure. I saw two of my students in the auditorium seats before me, a young woman of Indian heritage, the other African-American. They alternated between gazing spellbound at the stage and scribbling furiously in their notebooks. I filled page after page of my legal pad. So many quotable quotes, both from the Quran that Ramadan recited in Arabic, then translated, and from the man himself. He gave us verses from the Quran that praised diversity (“If it had been God’s will, you would be one community.”) and that demanded a connection to the Other (“He created out of you the other, and between you love and mercy.”) and toleration (“You have no power to impose belief on others. If God had willed it, the world would be all believers. Who are you to impose your belief on others?”). Indeed, according to the Quran, difference and struggle are necessary because they provide a balance of power (“If God hadn’t set people against each other, the world would be corrupt.”).

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By Namit Arora

In December 2005, I took a bus out of the coastal city of Vijayawada in South India. Heading west, I passed small towns and villages whose names—opaque to me because written only in Telugu—I kept guessing at from a map. After years of regional drought, the monsoon had been bountiful this year. We passed field after verdant field of cotton and pepper in a region infamous for its depleted water tables and farmers fleeing to other regions, or committing suicide to escape debt. It took most of the morning, on three buses and an auto-rickshaw, to reach my destination: a village with tourist facilities near the ruins of Nagarjunakonda.

A city flourished around 1,800 years ago at Nagarjunakonda (‘Hill of Nagarjuna’). A great religious and educational center of Brahmanism and Buddhism, one of the names it had then was Vijayapuri, after king Vijaya Satakarni of the Satavahana dynasty. Thereafter a capital of the Ikshvaku dynasty (225-325 CE), it fell into terminal decline after the demise of the last Ikshvaku king. It was only in 1926 that a teacher, S Venkataramayya, discovered the ruins of the ancient city. Much of it now lies under one of the largest manmade lakes in the world, Nagarjuna Sagar, formed in 1960 by the Nagarjuna Sagar dam across the Krishna River. Archaeological digs in 1926–60 turned up finds from the early Stone Age to medieval times, spread over 130 sites across 24 sq km. Many structures were moved and reassembled on what is now an island on the lake, as well as on the lake’s eastern bank at Anupu (much like the ‘saving’ of Abu Simbel from the Aswan Dam in Egypt).

The island’s modern name was inspired by one of the ancient city’s most illustrious citizens, Nagarjuna, a Buddhist monk-philosopher and founder of the ‘Middle Path’ school, who most likely lived there sometime in 150-250 CE. Called by some ‘the second Buddha’, Nagarjuna’s work is indispensable to several Buddhist schools, particularly Mahayana. ‘Nagarjuna’s philosophy represents something of a watershed not only in the history of Indian philosophy but in the history of philosophy as a whole,’ writes Douglas Berger, a scholar of Southasian thought, ‘as it calls into question certain philosophical assumptions so easily resorted to in our attempt to understand the world.’ [1]

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Justin E. H. Smith

Some readers will recall the exposé I wrote a few months ago on the life and work of the American poet Jason Boone. What might not have been obvious in that piece, as I would urgently like to clear up now, is that it was all entirely made up: every last word of it, from the meetings I had with Boone at Nirvana concerts in Sacramento in the late 1980s, to the documentary about Boone's life supposedly made by an MA student in the Media Arts Program a the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. There is no Media Arts Program in Fairbanks! In fact, the interviewees in the segment of the film I included in the exposé, one supposedly named 'Michel Pupici' and the other 'Dylan Cooney', are both plainly the same person filmed from different angles. What is more, anyone who has ever met me will be able to confirm that it is I myself, the author, Justin Smith, in both of those roles. I am looking unusually fat, true, and I do not appear entirely sober, but personal identity persisting as it does through such superficial changes, I feel I must come clean and acknowledge my role in the ruse. It was me. All of it. The entire operation behind the Jason Boone story was a one-man job, and that man was not Jason Boone.

You can thus imagine my surprise when, not long ago, on the morning of this year's Canadian Thanksgiving, I received a telephone call from a certain Augusta Aardappel. Readers will recall that Aardappel was supposedly the South African academic who had written a dissertation, in a Deleuzean vein, on the poetry of Jason Boone ('The Boone Rhizome'), and who apparently had dated Boone for a while in the early 1990s. But again, I made her up along with Pupici, Cooney, Coombs, and the rest. Anyone who has the faintest familiarity with the sonorities of Dutch should have been able to detect that she was a fabrication: 'Aardappel' literally means, 'earth-apple', and, on the model of the French 'pomme de terre', serves in Dutch as the word for 'potato' (in Afrikaans it is 'aartappel'). Have you ever met anyone named 'Mr. Potato'? Of course not. It is a name for fictional characters, not for real people.

Yet here was this woman on the telephone, on the morning of Canadian Thanksgiving, with a fully convincing Afrikaner accent, claiming to be none other than Augusta Aardappel. Of course at first I did not believe her, but I was also very intrigued, since my fiction had not previously inspired a great number of copycat hoaxes (I write in a non-existent genre –hyperlinked, multimedia, serial metafiction– and my readership, if I may be honest, is fairly limited). Curious to figure out why anyone would bother to perpetrate such a pointless fraud, I determined to keep this 'Augusta' on the phone for as long as I could.

I asked her how the weather was in Pretoria, what was her opinion of vuvuzelas, Julius Malema, and Die Antwoord. She complimented me on my familiarity with today's South Africa, and I told her it was really nothing, I just get it from my friends' Facebook status updates. I could conjure an equal semblance of knowledge, I told her, about Vietnam, Tonga, or Sakhalin Island (with the last of these I could even add some Chekhovian flourishes).

When I felt I had gained her confidence I put to Ms. Aardappel the inevitable question. Why, I asked, would she claim to be someone I had made up?

“There's something important I need to tell you,” she replied evasively. “Jason didn't die.”

“Of course he didn't die,” I answered. “He never existed in the first place. I made him up too. Now tell me where you're calling from and what it is you want.”

“I'm calling from across possible worlds,” was Augusta Aardappel's answer. “I'm calling because I need your help.”

I knew immediately she was telling the truth.

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I’ve never been in this position, but the person demanding a newspaper or magazine correction—the insider claiming he was quoted out of context; the scientist whose nuanced position didn’t come across, quite; the dead person who’s not really dead—must get a certain satisfaction from seeing the correction printed. It might be the grim satisfaction of a wrong set to rights too late, but satisfaction nonetheless. Then again, in a digital publication, a correction can work to the source’s advantage in some sense. If s/he finds the mistake early enough, an editor can amend it instantly and make sure that (most) everyone reads the correct sentence the first time. Some publications even mark the factual boner with an asterisk, which not only emphasizes the correct version of things, but provides some instant sympathy for the wronged party.

But as a disinterested reader, I’d never gotten actual delight from a correction until a few weeks ago, when the New York Times ran one for an article about study skills and retention (“Forget What You Know About Good Study Habits”). I’d read the uncorrected article online at first, then went back to reread it, for reasons soon ejected from my mind. I’d gotten through half the story, and was going to click through to the second page. And I was grimacing in anticipation of a paragraph I knew was coming up. The author had needed a metaphor conveying something about unintended consequences, and apparently wanted the imprimatur of science. So he fell back on that canned summary of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle—you know, the idea that measuring a property of a particle alters the property itself.

Except that’s not what the Uncertainty Principle says. All the Principle actually says, in its entirety, is:

∆x∆p ≥ h/4π

That’s it.

Now if you insist on translating quantum mechanics into English (always risky), the Principle says the uncertainty in a particle’s position (∆x) multiplied by the uncertainty in its speed and direction (taken into account through its momentum, ∆p) always exceeds the number “h divided by four times π.” (The h stands for Planck’s constant, a very tiny number; the π is the familiar constant from circles, 3.14159…) In simpler terms, if you know a particle’s position very well, you cannot know its momentum well at all, and vice versa.

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“The coming months will see a new world, where global history is redefined.”

– WikiLeaks’ Twitter Feed, November 22^nd

Julian Assange may be some new kind of journalist, but he is without a doubt some new kind of historian, too. He and his organization often frame their mission in terms of redefining history, as above, or in terms of offering history to the public. When asked what the consequences of the Iraq War Diaries would or should be, Assange answered, “the truth doesn’t need a policy objective.” Assange was also asked if the diaries were “a gift to historians.” He said no, the gift was not for historians, rather that the Iraqi people “need the history of the last 6 years” to better understand and operate in the present. Last night’s “Cablegate” release only amplifies this sense of breaking not just news, but history. As the New York Times notes in its coverage, the leak represents an unprecedented leap in access to primary sources: until last night only diplomatic cables up to 1972 were publically available.

They say that journalists write the first draft of history. A Latin American term for a first draft is a “borrador” or “eraser.” But the line between journalism (or indeed history) and fiction is easily smudged. Statements like those above from WikiLeaks and Assange assume primary sources, like the ones WikiLeaks provide give us the whole truth, or at least possess a unique “truthiness.” But documents like those released in the war diaries and Cablegate do not represent “the truth,” but rather are simply another vantage point from which to try and glimpse it. How much of a first draft do you ever end up keeping?

If we believe “truth” in history is just a sheaf of diplomatic cables, or Pentagon memos – that if we just read them all, then we’ll know – we deny the shifting, impossible project that history is.

That instability is something we are taught to deny. Just as journalists – and fifth graders – are taught the 5 W’s: Who, What, When, Why, and hoW, so too do historians write – and students of history are taught to write, if they are to be considered “serious” – with a sense of inevitability as their guide. This is true at least at the mainstream and lower branches of the academy (I include my own BA here), where it is not so au fait to imagine that, for example, the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand or the accession of Gorbachev were anything more than matches falling into existing stacks of kindling. Teleology is seductive.

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by Hasan Altaf

In a city like DC, the think tank circuit does a roaring trade in “developing countries,” their problems, and an endless list of ways to solve those problems and take those countries, to use the easy dichotomy of think tanks, from developing to developed. The hottest commodity on the market, lately, the dream subject of international development, is Pakistan. It has become the perfect laboratory for think tank experiments, a veritable Petri dish of everything that could go wrong and every possible way to imagine a solution; rarely does a week go by without a presentation or, at least, a visiting expert.

Recently, I went to one such presentation at a respected think tank in DC. It was raining, and people straggled in one by one, shucking off their overcoats and placing their umbrellas carefully under their chairs. The room filled up with suits and briefcases as the interns ran sound checks. The atmosphere, as the audience milled around waiting for the presentation to start, was so far removed from what we were there to hear about that it felt almost theatrical. It’s hard to tell, in such circumstances, whether you are part of the show or simply there to applaud – or, perhaps, both.

My usual instinct, out of not so much cynicism as sadness, is to avoid these events, and I had forgotten that their real purpose is never the one stated. The presentation is an afterthought, a sweetener. The real point is the social gathering, the first ten minutes and the last ten minutes. It was fascinating to watch the not-so-idle chitchat as people ran into old friends and found new ones, to overhear the experts trading war stories from their time “in the field.” People discovered friends or colleagues in common, experiences they had shared, times they had just barely missed each other. In a way, it was heartwarming. This world, of international development and the research that surrounds it, is a small one, and people stick together.

Somehow, though, I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was off. It felt as though the last century had disappeared and that all of a sudden we were back in the olden days. Coffee and bagels have replaced the gin and tonic, we have lunch meetings instead of chhota pegs and rounds of polo, and we wear business casual instead of whatever they wore back then, but the spirit of the thing is the same. These are safe spaces, as far as possible from the noise and the mess, for the agents of civilization – and, now, the native elites – to discuss and fix problems that are oceans away, to alter the courses of lives that are not their own.

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Years ago, London neurobiologists discovered a way to visualize the structural dynamics of memory formation using just a laser, a microscope, and a window. To start, they vivisected the craniums of dozens of laboratory mice and surgically embedded tiny glass panels into the outer fleshy folds of the living, exposed brains.

The researchers specifically targeted an area of the brain known as the visual cortex; their goal was to define the relationship between vision and memory. These implanted bits of glass were to serve as physical windows to the branching, ductile neurons of the brain; when scanned by a laser, they would allow for capture of microscopic images of fluorescing neurons and provide a glimpse into the creation of memories.

In 2009, their laborious efforts paid off. Mark Hubener’s lab at University College reported in January’s issue of Nature magazine that they had found a link between distinct neural growths and memories of past experiences. Through miniscule peepholes, Hubener’s team saw bud-like spines emerging from the branches of the brain’s neurons. These spines seemed to sprout most in response to new experiences, implicating them as the brain’s physical storage areas for memory.

Because Hubener’s work is fairly visual in nature, it’s easiest to begin with a mental picture of the brain. Let’s start by imagining its most basic component, the neuron, as a tree in winter, leafless with many branches, or dendrites. If the neuron is a tree, then the brain, quite simply, would be the forest where it resides. Now, if you can imagine that forest with one hundred billion trees densely packed into a space the size of a grapefruit, then you’ve got a basic idea of what the human brain looks like.

Not impressed? Each tree in your brain forest physically contacts the branches of thousands of other trees; in children, these contacts, or synapses, number a quadrillion, in adults, this number decreases then stabilizes to a mere few hundred trillion. If synapses were dollars, we’d have enough money to pay for the Bush administration’s tax cuts… for two thousand years*.

So, what’s the purpose of all of these branching contacts? Synapses serve as conduits of communication between neurons- they allow information to race from dendritic branch to dendritic branch, relaying messages of sense, perception, reaction, and thought. But what about memory? Where are our recollections of past experiences stored among this vast network of neurons?

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