by James McGirk

As I approach my fifteenth year living in the United States, I thought I ought peek under the hood and scrape some of the gunk off my filters to see how much distortion and prejudice has crept in between my ears. Marco Polo, patron saint of expatriate literature provides an excellent experimental model for doing so. Polo didn’t write his account of his 24-years exploring on behalf of the Kublai Kahn, Travels of Marco Polo; technically he dictated it to Rustichello de Pisa, three years after returning to Italy, while imprisoned in a Genoese prison.

Before Rustichello put his quill in Marco Polo’s inkwell, Polo just seemed like an old crank. One of those old traveler types who recounts ribald stories in exchange for food and drink; to his incredulous neighbors he was a merchant who had set out on an errand for a foreign sovereign and returned home twenty-four years later without much to show for it beyond some very strange stories. It wasn’t until he was captured by the Genoese and thrown in jail with a romance author were his stories documented and eventually published. The story goes that Marco Polo dictated his travels to Rustichello de Pisa out of sheer boredom. Although one does wonder whether the forced encounter between Polo and his amanuensis was entirely coincidental.

Even after dozens of folios and translations, Travels of Marco Polo retains the rolling rhythm of memories recounted out loud. Polo describes city after city, first outlining demographics and key economic details before meandering into anecdote. I thought I should go through the cities I had lived in the United States and, without doing any research whatsoever, I would describe the cities as if I were imprisoned in Genoa, and forced to affect Marco Polo’s style. I will begin my journey in Colorado as I did long ago:

The Mountain City of Boulder

Let me begin in the small mountain state of Colorado, in the city of Boulder, a city of some 60,000 souls laying approximately a day’s journey from the great aerodrome of Denver International Airport. Boulder is subject to the President of the United States of America, and its inhabitants worship myriad gods and goddesses, though most accept Jesus Christ as their lord. The city rests at the base of a great cliff, in the foothills the Rocky Mountains, the tallest and most forbidding of mountain ranges in the United States of America, though its highest peaks are dwarfed by the Himalayas.

Read more »

by Hasan Altaf

Looking back, I'm not sure how I got through my entire education, studying literature and writing, without ever really reading Greek drama; there was of course Shakespeare; Chaucer, at one point; I even have a vague memory of the Jataka tales, but no teacher or professor ever had me read or think about Greek tragedy. The stories we all knew, of course – Oedipus, Troy, Heracles, capricious deities – but we never actually read the material.

This did not strike me as a problem. Most people, after all, get through life just fine without Greek tragedy, and in any case it is hard to imagine literature more ancient and more removed from us; its relevance seemed questionable. A friend, however, recommend the poet Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red, a novel in verse that recreates the story of Geryon (in the myth, a many-headed monster Heracles kills to steal his cattle – one of the labors; in Carson's hands, an awkward, lonely child growing up), and I liked Carson's work, so I picked up another book of hers, Grief Lessons. Mostly I just liked the title, but it turned out to be a translation of four plays by Euripides. The book sat on my bookshelf for years, moving from Baltimore to Pakistan to DC, until I finally got around to it. Since then I have been oddly hooked; when you find yourself looking forward to comparing two translations of Sophocles' Elektra, you know something has gotten to you.

I am, obviously, no expert in this material; my knowledge of ancient Greece is essentially limited to what I remember of the myths and what Wikipedia tells me (among other things, that Melpomene, the Muse of Tragedy, was famous for her boots).

Read more »

by Maniza Naqvi

“I mean they’re what— all of nineteen or twenty at most? And when push comes to shove they are going to get hurt around here aren’t they? Occupy Wall Street? Taking on the police—and for what–where will this go?”

“What do you mean for what–what do you mean where will this go?” Brian looks at me in irritation.

“What are they asking for Brian?” I shout over the sloganeering and the police helicopters over head. It’s Friday late afternoon and I look at all the young people barely out of their childhood—now sitting down in the courtyard of the Police Headquarters—with their big cardboard hand made signs around them saying, “Occupy Everything,” and shouting, “We are the 99%.”

“Can’t you read the signs? They’re protesting Wall Street. They want to change the system.” Brian replies. “And that’s important.”

“So why are they protesting at the Police Headquarters—why not at 200 West Street at Goldman Sach’s headquarters? Why protest against police brutality—why not Goldman Sach’s brutality? I mean I agree with Mayor Bloomberg—these guys are doing their job and their being paid only US$30-50,000 a year. I mean the cops are part of the 99% as well! Aren't they? They are on the opposite side of the barricades but they are on the same side aren't they? They face the same issues don't they?”

“That’s not the point!”

Read more »

by Meghan D. Rosen

Each year, the Science Communication program at the University of California, Santa Cruz accepts 10 students and, for nine writing-intensive months, teaches them how to become better science journalists. This year, I am happy to say that I am one of the 10. My nine fellow classmates come from a wide variety of scientific backgrounds (from marine biology to mechanical engineering to neuroscience). We have a self-proclaimed ‘fish guts scientist,’ a potato pathologist, a reality TV star with survival skills (from the Discovery Channel’s, ‘The Colony’), a raptor surveyor (aka ‘hawk lady’), and an agricultural writer who grew up on a dairy farm.

It’s a diverse bunch of people, with a broad set of experiences, and the best part is: they all like to talk about science. I think I’m in heaven.

One of our recent assignments was to answer a classmate’s question that was about (or loosely connected to) our field of study. The constraints: we couldn’t use any jargon in the answer, it had to be clear to a non-scientist, and we had to do it in 200 words or less. Here are some of the question ideas we kicked around: Why does a golf ball have dimples? How does a submarine judge depth? Why do tarantulas migrate? How does the brain form memories?

I liked the challenge – answer a could-be complicated question with clarity–, and the idea of directly connecting scientists with people looking for answers to life’s curiosities.

So, this month, I’m trying an experiment for the readers of 3QD. Do you have any burning science-based questions that you’d like answered? Do you want to know how something works? Is there anything that you wish was just explained more clearly? If so, leave a question in the comments. I’ll solicit answers from my classmates, and get back to you next month. To help us get us started, I’ve included my own question and answer below (and yes, I stuck to the word limit –I even had two words to spare!).

Question: Why are doctors now recommending fewer screenings for breast cancer?

The idea behind breast cancer screening is simple: the sooner you find a lump, the sooner you can fight it. Until two years ago, the standard for care was frequent screenings and aggressive treatment. We were constantly on guard (yearly mammograms) and ever ready to wage surgical war (lump or breast removal). Intuitively, it made sense – root out the cancerous seed before it sprouts. Early detection should save lives, right? Not necessarily.

In 2009, an independent panel of experts appointed by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services found that mammograms didn’t actually cut the breast cancer death rate by much: only about 15 percent. But we were screening more women than ever. So why were so many people still dying?

The problem isn’t detection: mammograms are pretty good at pinpointing the location of an abnormal cell cluster in the breast. But not all abnormal cells are cancerous, and mammograms can’t tell the harmless ones from the dangerous ones. In other words, a lump is not a lump is not a lump.

Today, doctors are divided. Some think excessive screening forces thousands of women to undergo unnecessary surgeries. Others think one life saved is worth the cost.

by Fred Zackel

As the 2011 Nobel Prize announcement nears (October 12th for our handicappers), the U.K. betting site Ladbrokes has posted odds for the prize, putting Thomas Pynchon at (give or take) 10/1 odds to win the prize for literature.

I got my fingers crossed.

First off, Pynchon is clever and that makes his playfulness most pleasurable. His favorite playground is America’s fondness for conspiracy theories. These theories, no matter how whacko they sound, summarize and reflect cherished American values and morals. Lots of us are alienated from official reality. We find it easy (and maybe self-defeating) to deny its validity. (As a student of mine once said, “I think a lot of the time we take for granted the history of the world.”) But what if our own conclusions are denied legitimacy? What Pynchon does that is so subversive is to deny them closure. And seeing how those well-intentioned wackos are left high and dry actually adds to my merriment.

I first discovered Pynchon as the best man for Richard Farina’s marriage to Mimi Baez. I was a big fan of Farina’s novel “Been Down So Long It Looks Up to Me,” and so I went looking for Pynchon’s first novel. “V” was a rabbit hole, or maybe an oubliette. I fell. Maybe I was pushed. One enigmatic woman may have been at the nexus of the great events of the 20th century? I also traveled decades and the world with a schlemihl named Benny Profane and with Herbert Stencil, questing after his father, who may have been a legendary British spy. Hunting alligators in the New York sewers? A living figurehead lashed to the bow-sprit of a boat? Jewish princesses getting nose jobs? Coeds with 72 pairs of Bermuda shorts? All culminating in the trash heaps of Malta a half-century before? A long, strange trip indeed. And I was hooked by a sideways look at how we perceive reality. And conspiracy. “They – whoever ‘they’ were – seemed to be calling the tune,” was one ominous thought. Later, “Any situation takes shape from events much lower than the merely human.” Most importantly I learned that progress was best imagined as only a new coat of paint on our xebec adrift.

Read more »

Old Lovers

Two old lovers
–ships beached
near the sea of love

in a cove off a bay
no storm can reach,
lean into each other
longing

not for past passion,
not listening for a poet’s speech
just listing, leaning each into each

by Jim Culleny
2009

By Dave Munger

For nearly a year now, I've been writing here about poverty in America and what it's like to be in my brother's shoes: Like millions of Americans, Mark is a man who has worked hard for most of his life but is now unable to support himself. For a variety of reasons, today's column will be my last for 3QuarksDaily, and I thought I'd use it to sum up what I've learned over the past year.

1. Poor people are just like everyone else. This should be obvious, but for many, it's not: Most poor people want to be productive members of society. They have dreams and aspirations and to the extent that they are able, they are working to achieve them.

2. Poor people are not just like everyone else. This is the less-obvious corollary. Nearly every poor person has suffered enough misfortune to render him or her incapable of earning enough to cover even the basic necessities of life; nearly everyone else has not. In Mark's case, his body simply wasn't suited to the hard, physical jobs he was able to find. Eventually his body gave out, and he was forced to give up his long-established independent lifestyle and ask for help from the government, friends, and family.

3. Poor people are not like other poor people. Some poor people are lazy, some are not. Some poor people are uneducated, some are not. For every stereotype about poor people, there are thousands—millions—of poor people who do not fit that stereotype. But that doesn't mean there aren't some aspects of being poor that impact nearly all poor people. For example,

4. Trouble disproportionately impacts the poor. For most people, an unexpected setback like a car breakdown or an illness is an annoyance, but for the poor, it can unleash a catastrophic cascade of events. If your car breaks down and you have only $200, which you were planning on spending for the electric bill, you may face a choice between living without power or living without a job: If you can't pay to get the car fixed, you can't get to work. Many poor people have no sick leave: Get so sick that you can't work, and you get fired.

5. Getting government aid is hard, dehumanizing work. When Mark finally realized he could no longer support himself, it took years for him to be officially deemed “disabled” and therefore eligible for Federal assistance. Worse, the process almost requires that a person abandon hope: “You have to convince yourself you're disabled,” Mark said at the time. “Your whole life you've been thinking about taking care of yourself [and suddenly] you're no good anymore and you need help.”

The process of justifying your aid doesn't stop once you are place on Social Security Disability. You still need to prove, twice a year, that you need medical coverage, food stamps, and continually demonstrate that you are disabled and unable to work.

I could go on, but one thing I've learned about poor people over the past year is that cataloging their problems doesn't help much.

Read more »

By Namit Arora

Homer’s Iliad is the story of an epic war between the Greeks and the Trojans. The apparent cause of the war was the ‘abduction’ of Helen by Paris—Helen was the wife of Menelaus, king of Sparta; Paris was the son of Priam, king of Troy. Menelaus, his pride wounded, called on other Greek kings bound to him by an oath. Joining forces, they set sail and laid siege to the coastal city of Troy in Asia Minor. Mostly an account of the last days of the war, the Iliad teems with intrigue, character, and incident.

Herodotus, the 5th century BCE historian regarded as the father of history, lived more than three hundred years after the Iliad was written. He is justly famous for preferring rational—rather than mythical and supernatural—explanations for human events; to understand his past he looked to the actions, character, and motivations of men. Among the more charming passages of Histories is his take on the Trojan War. In his day and age, the Iliad was considered a true account of Greek ancestry and it was obligatory for every Greek schoolboy to read it. Cultivated Greek gents were expected to recite colorful stretches from it.

From the start, Herodotus had trouble with the Iliad. He found it odd that the Trojans, ‘when the Greeks ran off with their women, never troubled themselves about the matter; but the Greeks, for the sake of a single [Spartan] girl, collected a vast armament, invaded Asia, and destroyed the kingdom of Priam’. He doubted that Helen could have been taken from Sparta against her wishes, and even if she was, wasn’t that deed the work of a rogue, unworthy of such a large mobilization by the Greeks? What also didn’t sit well with his sense of human nature was the response of the otherwise reasonable Trojans to the Greek invasion, for ‘surely neither Priam nor his family could have been so infatuated as to endanger their own persons, their children and their city, merely that Paris might possess Helen.’

Read more »

by Kevin S. Baldwin

Anniversaries be they of marriages or births, are generally a time to celebrate (another lap around the sun, yeah!). They can also be a time of darker speculation: “What if I had stayed single, gotten married, married someone else, hadn’t been so career-focused, or hadn’t been born?” These “what if” scenarios are the subject of many novels and films (e.g., A Christmas Carol, The Last Temptation of Christ, The Family Man, and It's a Wonderful Life), because they link regret, acceptance, and possibility.

Anniversaries also focus our attention on particular dates or years. Two years ago, there was much celebration of the bicentennial of Charles Darwin's birth (1809) and the sesquicentennial of his publication of his On the Origin of Species (1859). In 1859, John Stuart Mill published On Liberty and Edwin Drake discovered oil in western Pennsylvania. The competitive pursuit of liberty through the consumption of oil has characterized much of the late 19th and all of the 20th Century. With regard to the recent sesquicentennial of 1859, my purpose is not so much to ask “what if?” (as in the stories and films cited earlier) as it is to ask “what now?” The result is that I hope to offer a way to incorporate the full implications of Darwin, Drake, and Mill’s work to get us to the next big anniversary in 2059.

How did we get to 1859? To understand Darwin, we need to recall Malthus whose 1798 Essay on the Principle of Population established the idea that food production increased arithmetically (or linearly) while populations increased geometrically (or exponentially), thus growing populations would rapidly outstrip their food supply. Malthus' insights informed both Darwin's and Alfred Russel Wallace's formulations of natural selection and they acknowledged him explicitly in their writings.

Darwin's On the Origin of Species in 1859 is most remembered for the principle of natural selection and its popularization into phrases like Herbert Spencer's (1864) “Survival of the fittest” and Alfred Tennyson's (1849) “Nature, red in tooth and claw.” Even today, a reference to The Origin evokes the idea that life is hard and competitive. In a word: Darwinian.

The second great contribution of 1859 was Edwin Drake's discovery of oil near Titusville, Pennsylvania, which launched the American petroleum industry. Oil is an astonishingly energy dense material. A single 42 gallon barrel of oil may contain the energy-equivalent of about 25,000 hours of human labor. Oil also provides the chemical feed-stock for many items that we consider to be essential (e.g., chemicals including plastics and pharmaceuticals). Cheap, readily available oil has given us lots of energy to do many things and make lots of stuff.

The third great contribution of 1859 was John Stuart Mill's On Liberty, which advocated for the moral and economic freedom of individuals from government and other citizens. Mention Mill today and terms like utilitarianism, libertarianism (both upper and lower case), and individual freedom come to mind immediately. On Liberty is perhaps best known for the phrase: “Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.”

Combined with the seemingly inexaustible supply of cheap energy in the form of oil, competition and individuality became the defining metaphors for the development of western civilization in the late 19th and 20th centuries. A selective reading of the lessons of 1859 would be that life, including the human condition, is a struggle, energy is cheap and abundant, and the pursuit of individuality and freedom are paramount. Does this not sound like America in the first decade of the 21st Century?

Read more »

by Joy Icayan

I was recently in one of those hole-in-the-wall drinking places with friends from the human rights community. It was a rather decrepit place, just a bunch of plastic tables and monobloc chairs and a small booth that served dirt cheap beer and street food. In the mornings it was transformed into a canteen. The toilets in the restroom didn’t flush. Vendors peddling nuts, eggs and apples came in and out. We went there at least once a week to talk of politics and personal lives and take advantage of the cheap beer. That night, we had brought a friend—a French volunteer. She was in her sixties, spending her retirement visiting the world and talking to people. It was her first time in my country, and since she seemed game for everything, including travelling alone to mining-affected indigenous communities six hours from the city, we decided to bring her to our little hidden place.

Now this place had a videoke machine in one corner and a television forever tuned to a horse racing channel in another. The videoke machine had one of those preprogrammed reels of scantily clad women, mostly Caucasian women in bikinis running along a beach, or pole dancing or walking or fixing their hair, or pouting at the camera. It was a constant barrage of cleavage and thighs and it went on whatever song you chose; eventually the clips repeated themselves, or the same women repeated themselves in different ‘storylines’. We were used to it; there were other reels you could choose, reels of marine life or cartoon characters, but most machines played the clips of the women. That night, someone from another table had requested to turn the machine on, and started a bad rendition of a love song.

Our French visitor stared at the video going on, it was just the camera doing a quick close up scan of a pretty woman’s body. We had been talking about mining. “Stop me,” she said “before I smash that screen.”

It had been something of a joke, of course, but until that moment none of us had seriously thought about what was wrong with the clips. Annoying and silly, yes, but that was it. It was everywhere–in the cheap bars, in rural clubs, even in some homes. And there was something rather ironic to that; that we would often meet there to discuss activism and the rights of vulnerable people, that at that time one of the most controversial bills in the Congress was something on reproductive health, a bill that proposed access to information and methods of reproductive health, and we couldn’t quite understand how people, a sizable portion of the population could oppose that.

“I really am going to smash that screen,” she said, and we knew her enough at that point, respected her guts, that we thought we had better leave.

Read more »

by Tom Jacobs

As almost every individual possesses some article which in itself is of little value, but in a collective view, becomes of real importance, the patrons of this institution solicit the attention of their fellow-citizens to the Museum, and request their aid towards forming a collection which promises fair to become an object of public utility.

–John Pintard, writing on behalf of the Tammany society, 1791

I am staring at a mastodon tooth and a squid beak. I bought them on ebay a few years back and they have become among my most prized possessions. This tooth was once in the jaw of a creature that lumbered through Kentucky around ten to twenty thousand years ago. This beak once in the body of a creature that inhabited the abyss where we can’t go (at least not without considerable applications of technology). We aren’t meant to be there, in those dark spaces of the earth. Yet they call to us, they interpellate us. We can’t not respond.

Let me begin with a story.

The first reported discovery of the bones of what would come to be known as the Mastodon was in 1705 in the little village of Claverack, right off the Hudson River and about seventy miles north of New York City. No one knew quite what to make of it, but the skull was itself interesting on many fronts—it had a strange looking hole in the middle of it, suggesting cyclopean possibilities.

Unearthed bones of the mastodon had been a point of considerable interest to American natural philosophers since the time of Cotton Mather, who speculated about their origins in a series of letters he sent to the Royal Society in 1712. Mather maintained that the fossil teeth were scientific proof of the existence of the human giants mentioned in the Bible, of the giants who walked in the earth, waaay back in the day. He writes in a letter of November 17, 1712.

Read more »

by Rishidev Chaudhuri

There are many things that fascinate me about Calcutta: the way it remains poised between the stagnant and the revolutionary, the contrast between the ubiquitous echoes of history and the seeming timelessness of much of the city's life, the faded intimations of a once grand modernist city, the oddly archetypal characters who wander its streets, the distinct discrete obsessions of its inhabitants. Perhaps all cities are seen this way by those who love them and perhaps such love is unjustifiable and untranslatable. The people I tell to visit are sometimes disappointed, and I can understand why; the city can seem oddly provincial for a place that was once so central to empire and India.

But, by way of partial and possibly incoherent justification, here are a few stories from the city, excerpts from a collection of memories gathered when I was working for a newspaper there. To me they seem to capture something essential about the city – the sort of story someone who knew the city would listen to with immediate recognition and often an exasperated fondness.

I

As soon as he heard what I was there for, the elderly waiter straightened up a little, handed his grimy rag (used for everything from wiping down tables to cleaning plates) to the junior waiter who followed him around and came and stood next to me.

“What you must understand,” he said without preamble, “is that you can't just mix rice and meat together in any way. There is a process. And these days people come in asking for chicken biryani. How can that be? You tell me how that can be.” He was getting quite agitated now. “I tell them, biryani has to be made from meat. It is not a biryani otherwise. You can't boil chicken and mix it with rice. And people sell that as biryani.

And it must have some fat on it. You even get people complaining about that. You should write about it in your newspaper. Wait one minute.”

Read more »

by Misha Lepetic

Financial markets have a very safe way of predicting the future. They cause it.
George Soros, Der Spiegel

Purpose-built cities are nothing new, especially when an authoritarian government seeks to establish a new capital far from the distractions and chaos of the commercial capital. Recent and well-known examples include Abuja, Naypyidaw and Brasilia, but one can go further back into history to find others: St Petersburg and Washington, D.C. are principal examples from the 18^th century, and Ayutthaya was established in 1350 by King U Thong and remained the capital of the Kingdom of Siam until it was razed by the Burmese Army in 1767. Nature has been equally adept at forcing the hand of governments, however: Belmopan, the current capital of Belize, was built following 1961’s Hurricane Hattie, which nearly leveled Belize City (then the capital of British Honduras, if we are to be perfectly accurate in these matters).

Unilaterally decreeing the establishment of a city is not without its risks, of course. The urban form acquires its robustness through a complex, dynamic and unpredictable confluence of people engaging in economic, military and cultural activity. Another crucial ingredient is any city’s contextual relationship to the rest of the world, usually represented by access to either resources or control of valuable trade routes. Thus it is not surprising to learn of the fate of Akhetaten, hardly outlived by its founder, the Pharaoh Akhenaten, father of Tutankhamen. Now known as Amarna, it was founded by Akhenaten’s vision of a society unified through the worship of a single cult, that of the Sun or the Aten. However, 1353 BC proved to be a bit early for the monotheistic worldview, and following Akhenaten’s death both the city and his theological innovation were abandoned within a few years.

More recently, the purpose-built city has served another function: that of goosing GDP. It is well known that the Chinese government has thrown itself wholesale into the business of city-building. Depending on who is counting, there are upwards of dozens of metropolises designed to accommodate anywhere from 100,000 to millions of new inhabitants. While I have already written about at the over-reach of urban planning in attempting to design entire cities as effective places for people to live, in this case it is much more interesting to look at why these cities are being built in the first place.

Read more »