by Jenny White

I’m a faithful reader of the New York Times Science Section, cover to cover, because I want to know about things, not be caught flatfooted. Somehow it seems necessary for survival to know about quarks and bosons, the social structure of ants, scientific explanations of the smile, and the sexual life of grapes. I had a fling with books explaining how to endure being stranded in snow (make an igloo) and identify edible weeds in the park. What does this say about me? I never kept any extra food in the house beyond what was fresh in the fridge until after 9/11 when I laid in some canned beets and tomato sauce and a gallon jug of water. The tomato sauce exploded and the water leaked, so clearly I am batting zero as a survivalist. Perhaps knowing things about the world lets me feel that nothing can surprise me, jump out of the dark corners beyond my peripheral vision. Illness is like that. Two months ago I saw spots and flashes in my right eye and was told I had a partially detached retina. Why? No reason. Out of the blue. Once I was allowed to read again after the repair, I read a lot about retinas. But what do we really learn about how illnesses and the body work from reading popular science? Recently, I had a long conversation with a prominent scientist at Harvard, the molecular biologist Michael R. Freeman, who explained to me what cancer was. It wasn’t anything I expected, even after years of reading science stories. It was as if he had opened a door into an alternate universe. Below is a transcript of part of our conversation.

Jenny White: Tell me what we should know about cancer?

Michael Freeman: Cancer is an uncontrolled proliferation of cells, so a tumor is actually is a swelling or a cyst, something that isn’t necessarily life-threatening, but a malignancy is something that has the potential to grow and spread in the body and its the spreading in the body as well as the growth that is lethal. We’re still trying to understand fundamental processes that are part of cancer. A recently recognized process involved in cancer, for instance, is autophagy, which means “self-eating.” This is a normal way that cells use to conserve energy and nutrients, and it’s a process that can be used by cancer cells to progress to malignant states. Tumor cells generally are in a very stressful environment, so there’s a Darwinian pressure to select for variants that can overcome various stresses. So if you’re a tumor cell and your descendants have the ability to take in nutrients from this process of autophagy, then you have a selective advantage over other cells that might be killed in the stressful environment.

JW: So basically the Pac-Man cells survive because they eat the cells surrounding them.

MF: They actually eat themselves.

JW: Are there any other cool concepts that are out there? Autophagy, self-eating Pac-Man cells. What else is going on?

MF: There’s another concept that was very new when I was a postdoctoral fellow, but is now very much understood to be a fundamental process in tumor biology, which is apoptosis or programmed cell death. This is a program that cells initiate that causes them to die. It’s basically cell-suicide. There are signaling molecules that can initiate the suicide program that’s built into the cell. This is a normal process that takes place during development. The fingers on your hand were created in part through an apoptopic mechanism, where the webbing between the digits was formed by cells killing themselves. In development, in the formation of the body plan, there’s growth as well as loss of structure. It even happens during normal life as an adult. It’s like what a sculptor does, right? A sculptor creates form by removing things.

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On the anniversary of his death:

A tribute to Omar Azfar by Azra Raza, M.D.

There’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ’t is not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all.

Shakespeare, HAMLET, Act v. Sc. 2.

At the end, the readiness to face whatever providence had in store was there, both in the case of Omar as well as his mother Naheed. I only saw him two or three times without Naheed in the roughly 16 months of our acquaintance in New York, therefore it is hard for me to think of them separately. She brought her two sons to meet me in September of 2007 shortly after I had moved to New York. Omar, the 38 year old elder son, a graduate of Oxford and Columbia, had been diagnosed with a highly malignant osteogenic sarcoma of the left shoulder. He had received a round of aggressive chemotherapy a few days before and his mouth was a battlefield of raw ulcers, abraded mucosa, bleeding gums. As we sat down to an elaborate meal with family and a few close friends, Omar calmly produced a bottle containing some sort of a bland, soothing drink and sipped away as if it were an equally exclusively prepared gourmet meal, all the while entertaining us with his signature brilliant quips and observations. Such was his class, such his chic. My childhood friend and the current Consul General of Pakistan, Mohsin Razi and his lovely wife Sarwat were present at dinner that evening. Earlier this year, when Mohsin and Sarwat heard about Omar’s death, they rushed to offer their condolences to Kamal and Naheed, both tearing up in the car at the memory of this dinner when Omar had shown such an astonishing and calm acceptance of his condition.

Starting with the first note I received from Omar via cyberspace in the summer of 2007 which was copied to Ama, and ending with my last glimpse of him as he lay dying with his mother curled up next to him in bed, straightening his blanket, holding his hand, I was exquisitely aware of what a unique privilege it was to be witnessing this sublime relationship. Of course love is never quantifiable. In Shakespeare’s Anthony and Cleopatra, Act 1 Scene 1, Cleopatra demands to know how much Anthony loves her.

Cleo.If it be love indeed, tell me how much.

Ant.There’s beggary in the love that can be reckon’d.

Cleo.I’ll set a bourn how far to be belov’d.

Ant.Then must thou needs find out new heaven, new earth.

The friendship alone that existed between Omar and Naheed would require new heavens and new earths to accommodate it.

Arz o samaan kahaan teri wusatt ko paa sakay

Mera hee dil hai wu kay jahan tu samaan sakay

Continue reading here.

There has been much concern in the American media about Jared Loughner’s sanity, lots of talk about the fact we cannot comprehend the mind behind that cold face, talk followed by overextended attempts to mine that mind’s deepest veins. “If you think what happened in Tuscon is incomprehensible…” a 60 Minutes piece from last week began, keep watching, we’ll help you comprehend. Is Loughner “disturbed enough to be found guilty but insane?” the New York Times mulled in the Magazine last weekend. The answer is yes, they hint.

But no one is calling Loughner a terrorist.

In May 1995, Time had a terrorist on the cover: Timothy McVeigh was shown with the caption, “The Face of Terror.” Time’s lede for another story on McVeigh is also pretty clear in its framing:

Terrorists succeed by remaining faceless. Their very anonymity allows them to move unnoticed among and around the people they plan, for reasons of their own, to maim or murder. But terrorists also occasionally get caught, although often, alas, after they have done their worst. And then the sight of their faces only deepens the mystery of their actions.

Like McVeigh, Loughner targeted a symbol of government power, and hurt innocent people. Like McVeigh, Loughner had a complicated relationship with the military and, like McVeigh, he apparently had a deep mistrust of the United States government. Jared Loughner, like Timothy McVeigh, “had reasons of his own,” which are and always will be inaccessible to the rest of us.

But we called McVeigh a terrorist. Why isn’t Loughner a terrorist? Has America redefined its criteria for who can be one?

This is not to say Loughner’s actions weren’t swept up into other people’s political frameworks. To be sure, after the shooting, there was a flurry of conversation about politics. Or rather, “politics.” David Brooks argued that mainstream coverage overemphasized possible political motivations, with all the talk of Sarah Palin’s map and the “violent rhetoric of the Tea Party.” Brooks describes “a news media that is psychologically ill informed but politically inflamed, so it naturally leads toward political explanations.” Brooks is right in his diagnosis, but I see the opposite symptom: the media may be psychologically ill informed, but that hasn’t stopped them from attempting to psychologize Loughner to the nth degree.

Moreover, such an excavation of Loughner’s mind as those extended by the Times and 60 Minutes seems to be a privilege the media only affords, in 2011, to some violent men. Men who are called terrorists are ascribed political, ideological motivations. Loughner’s mental illness does not preclude such motivations – but our media’s language does, dismissing his admittedly confused political logic as the babble of a madman.

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by Colin Eatock

Last year, in my essay “What’s Wrong with Classical Music,” I discussed the causes of the marginalization of classical music in the Western world today. That essay approached the topic from the outside, examining the reasons why people who don’t like classical music are put off by it. In this “sequel,” classical music is approached from the inside. To do this, I’ll take a more subjective approach, addressing those aspects of the classical music world that I personally find troubling.

I’ve been around the classical music block – as a composer, critic, scholar, educator, booking agent and administrator. As a result, I find that my own “issues” often differ from the concerns of people blissfully unaware of what lies hidden behind classical music’s façade. Yet even though some of the things I find problematic might not be readily identified as problems at all by many others, they have an adverse effect on classical music in the world today. I believe that if my various concerns were successfully addressed, the changes wrought would be beneficial in subtle yet far-reaching ways.

Fixation on the Canon

In the hyper-canonic world of classical music, there are only a few dozen composers who really count. All the rest – those composers you can’t buy a plaster bust of – receive little or no attention. I don’t have any great quarrel to the composers who have been accepted into the pantheon: Bach, Beethoven and Brahms wrote some wonderful music. However, I do question the idea that the formation of the canon was, as some people believe, a “natural” process caused by “the cream rising to the top.” (To accept this idea is to place far too much faith in the universe’s propensity for justice.) And I do have a quarrel with the idea that the composers who have somehow risen to the top are the only ones worthy of the world’s interest.

There are, to be sure, advantages to this star system. By focussing narrowly on a small number of composers and works, commonly shared tastes are cultivated, and a securely large audience for popular repertoire has been built up: a core audience for a core repertoire. Few musical organizations would dare to present a concert season that contained no widely acknowledged masterpieces by great composers, fearing box-office death. But they know they can rely on a handful of famous composers and works to sell their tickets.

On the other hand, fixation on “greatness” leads to repetitious programming. It’s also alarmingly unimaginative: for people to unquestioningly accept, holus-bolus, a repertoire based on decisions already well established in their grandparents’ day smacks of cultural sclerosis. One exceptional corner of the musical world – where a process of re-evaluation and enrichment took place throughout the twentieth century – is the early-music movement. But even the early-music specialists are losing their sense of adventure nowadays, and are settling into a core repertoire of their own.

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Photo Credit: Angie Hill

by Meghan Rosen

Last year, while doing our taxes, my husband and I were surprised to discover that we weren’t as poor as we thought we were. As lowly graduate students making a combined income of about $50,000 per year, I had assumed we were on the penny-pinching side of the national pay scale. But when I compared our income to the median income in the country, I found that we were sitting comfortably in the center. We had made it; we were officially smack-dab in the middle class. I thought it would feel different.

In the United States, nearly 25% of the population makes less than $25,000 per year. At this bottom level, a few households squeak by the poverty threshold, but just barely: in 2010 it’s estimated at just $22,314 for a family of four.

This year, 16 million children will be born into poverty (1 out of every 5 children born in the US). The lives of these children often follow a common stagnant storyline: poor nutrition, delayed mental and emotional development, academic deterioration, criminal activity, and frequently, early parenthood. As young parents, they are more likely to be unwed, more likely to drop out of high school, and more likely to stay impoverished. The cycle is vicious, and unrelenting. But is it possible to escape? How early is the influence of our environment engraved into the patterns of our development?

In 2003, a study from the University of Virginia showed that 7 year-old fraternal twins raised in families with low socioeconomic status had almost no variability in IQ. Why is this surprising? Fraternal twins are as genetically dissimilar as any other pair of non-twin siblings—their IQs should have been different.

Unlike identical twins, which come from the same blend of a single sperm and a single egg’s DNA, and have matching sets of genes, fraternal twins are completely unique. Two eggs and two sperm form two separate embryos: two genetically distinct individuals that share only their time and space together in the womb. The height, build, athletic ability, and IQ of one fraternal twin can be as different from the second as any of their other brothers or sisters. In fact, differences between fraternal twins are not only common; they are expected.

Why then, were these differences not reflected in the mental abilities of the 7-year olds? Is it possible that variation in IQ doesn’t occur until later in childhood? Or did their low socioeconomic environments somehow mask their inherent genetic potential?

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A fair amount of teasing from friends has nearly weaned me of the impulse to rush to the aid of every Japanese salary-man I see passed out on Tokyo’s late-night streets. These men, always men, of all ages, used to cause me a great deal of concern. I try to fold my concern inward now, in a way that doesn’t slow my step or disturb the flow of my thoughts as I pass by. Or I give myself over to observation: of the jacket loosely enveloping a thin middle-aged man balled up like a black seed against the bathroom wall – a little kernel destined no doubt to sprout into domestic trouble the next morning. Or of the tailored suit holding itself up against that building, the man inside it swallowing air loudly to prevent vomit from rising up from his stomach. The vomit rises despite his efforts, and soon – very soon – I think to myself, he’ll be horizontal on the street, passed out on those stairs over there where I had seen a man passed out the previous week.

There was a late-night television show where a microphone had been set up in front of a bustling subway station. A sign posted in front of the unsupervised amplifier read something like “The Drunk’s Sermon: Please Step Up.” The speeches were all variations on the monstrous condition of salary-man life and the restorative properties of alcohol: “Life is hell…drink to forget.” “Drink is the only escape from this hell.” “Drink makes life worth living.” “Kids,” intones one older man whose eyes reveal that he has a few children himself, “You may think I am repulsive but soon you will be just like me.” So unoriginal, so badly executed, so hackneyed and broken were these rants, that they couldn’t help but touch on some larger if also colorless truth about Japanese men and their relationship to alcohol.

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Fire in the Brain

God is a fire in the brain Nijinsky said
which is as close to the truth as
anything a dancer might dance
with a bonfire burning in his head

God may put you in a trance
with the fluttering of cardinal wings
or with the way the moon looks
mounting the mountain’s back
on the other side of the river
—a bright hole in the dark
a splinter of hope
a sliver

Sometimes beyond the blazing bars
of your incarceration
you hallucinate stars

You surmise the sun’s a substantiating eye
but fear that every distance is not near
(not close enough to make the untellable clear)

You dream days
You dream nights

Sometimes you lie without a clue
in the hour of the wolf
waiting for the wolf to bite

or you wait for the blue to light
When it does you see crocuses

You taste a sweet cloud of honeysuckle
that drifts across the yard
where at a certain spot
between the garden and the shed
you swear paradise was there
—precisely there where a skunk
had shred the grass the night before
grubbing while you were in bed
; grubbing with a skunky conflagration
in her head

God may burn a brain and brand it
God may shrink it or expand it

This is the bed in which
our ignorance reposes which,
by every blister on our brain,
is both a bed of coals
and roses

by Jim Culleny, 1/22/11

by Hasan Altaf

Several years ago now, in one of those brown-meets-white movies whose titles are as impossible to keep straight as their plots are predictable, the brown girl attempted to explain Bollywood movies to her white boyfriend. He asked, “So they’re like soap operas?” and she replied, “Basically… just with bigger bubbles.” I’ve forgotten all the other details of that particular movie, but the line stuck with me as an apt description of the genre. No one watches Bollywood movies for “reality” – we watch for an escape: More than anything else, the movies, offering a little something for everyone, are fantasy.

I readily admit to a deep and abiding fondness for Bollywood; my experience with soap operas, on the other hand, began this past summer, when I spent two weeks in Lahore visiting my grandmother, who had been bedridden for a few months and spent her time watching Indian soaps. The TV in her room was always on, and it was soaps, soaps around the clock, Star Plus and Colors, sometimes the same episode repeated innumerable times in a day. Only when the power went out was there a brief hour of silence.

The soap operas were, to put it mildly, an education – and a shock; for some reason I had expected them to be more or less like the movies, and I was surprised at how different they were. In many ways, the first issue I had is still the one that bothers me the most: Why do the women all sleep in full makeup, wearing pounds of jewelry, wrapped in fabulous saris? This happened on every single show, without fail, and it seemed neither practical nor comfortable. I might have been willing to let this one thing go, but the more I watched, the more questions I had. Why do the women never seem to work? Why are men essentially absent? Why are all the characters, always, without fail, Hindus – and Hindus, at that, of the same caste, culture, and language? How many small towns exist in the world in such a state of homogeneity?

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Mixcloud.com is a site for radio DJs with no place to go. I like it because the idea is to be legal and upfront about the whole business, paying royalties to artists just like real radio. Sets stream at a reasonably high bitrate, and there are some very talented mixers who post there. I post there too, occasionally, and I have just put up two sets of space music in the style of Star's End, a spacemusic radio show broadcast in Philadelphia on WXPN-FM since 1976. I used to do the show in the 1980s, until 1993 in fact. It's still running, and can be heard on the 'net in real time every Saturday night/Sunday morning, thanks to the capable custodianship of longtime host Chuck van Zyl (an accomplished space musician himself, I might add). Here are some notes on these two rather different sets, which I mixed on Garageband (!) and which work pretty well if I do say so myself.

Star's End Annex set 49 can be found here.

Artist – Track Album (Label)
—————————————————————————————
David Tagg – Pt. 1 Fundamentals of Orchid Biology (Second Sun)
Lähtö – Drift Leaving behind the sun (self release)
Tuu – Gangiri The Frozen Lands (Amplexus)
Thomas Köner – 43° 42' N 7° 16' E (Hour Two) La Barca (Fario)
Uton – Ay Um Au Lam 6 Whispers From the Woods (Last Visible Dog)
Akira Rabelais – 1382 Wyclif Gen. ii. 7 And spiride in to the face of hym an entre of breth of lijf. Spellewauerynsherde (Samadhi Sound)
Steve Roach – Deep Sky Time New Life Dreaming (Timeroom Editions)
Yui Onodera – Untitled (track 3) Entropy (Trumn)
Xiphiidae – Untitled (side B) Stardive (Cloud Valley)
Aglaia – Untitled (track 1) Three Organic Experiences (Hic Sunt Leones)

Guitar droners are a dime a dozen nowadays, but David Tagg is one of the very best. This is from a recent disc, available here for only $8. While you're there pick up Waist Deep Seas Of Milk, which is very nice and not at all as gross as the title makes it sound. For more guitar drone than you could possibly listen to and live, check out Alan Lockett's monumental six-part series of Great Axescapes: an Archaeology of Drone-gaze Tone-haze Guitar-wrangling.

Our next track is pretty drony too. Lähtö is Tyke Chandler, who is not a Finn at all, that band name notwithstanding, but hails from Louisville, Kentucky. On his myspace page he lists his influences as “tim hecker, andrew chalk, bohren & der club of gore, port-royal, eluvium, the conet project, double leopards, grouper, max richter, jesu, ulver, [and] mogwai.” An eclectic chap! As I mention at the Mixcloud page, this record is freely downloadable from his website, so check it out.

Tuu were a fairly typical but very well-regarded ethno-ambient group, led by drummer Martin Franklin. They came out of the ambient techno scene, but they soon left the techno elements behind (less drum, more gong and clay pot), eventually releasing discs on such worthy ambient labels as Hic Sunt Leones and Fathom. According to Wikipedia, The Frozen Lands (1999) was their final release. Too bad, they were pretty good. See also Franklin's disc Maps Without Edges (1996), released under the name Stillpoint.

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By Alyssa Pelish

I. What We Talk About

“It would seem that the variability of the weather was purposely devised to furnish mankind with unfailing material for conversation.” –Emily Post, Etiquette

It can’t be a difficult thing to compile a commonplace book on that most commonplace of topics, the weather. (In fact, a quick search at Amazon reveals at least six such efforts, including three variations of a Webster’s book of quotations, an illustrated book of Yankee weather proverbs, and a significant portion of the Pooh Book of Quotations.) As a fact of life, it’s inescapable (Wallace Stevens: “What is there here but weather…?”), as a conversation topic it’s failsafe (see Emily Post’s sincere advice, above), and as a failsafe conversation topic it is and has been poked and poked fun at by linguists, anthropologists, and the generally sardonic (Samuel Johnson: “It is uncommonly observed, that when two Englishman meet, their first talk is of the weather; they are in haste to tell each other, what each must already know, that it is hot or cold, bright or cloudy, windy or calm.”). But despite its completely talked-out status, the banality of talking about it and of talking about talking about it (or maybe because of it?), I can’t stop thinking about how we talk about the weather.

For a number of years, I wanted to believe that there were hidden depths to our talk about the weather. Of course, such small talk does contain an accepted subtext: phatic communion is what it’s called, coined by the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski while living with the Melanesian tribes of Eastern New Guinea, where he equitably observed how “a mere phrase of politeness, in use as much among savage tribes as in a European drawing room, fulfils a function to which the meaning of its words is almost completely irrelevant. Enquiries about health, comments on weather, affirmations of some supremely obvious state of things – all such are exchanged…not in order to express any thought.” He finally concluded that “each utterance is an act serving the direct aim of binding hearer to speaker by a tie of some social sentiment other.” So yes, small talk is a social gesture; it is connective tissue, not content – and weather comprises a substantial part of it. But still it seemed to me that passing talk of sunlight and snowfall and heat and humidity was different from other small talk. Or, at least, I needed to believe it.

Generations of parent-child relationships subsist on phatic communion: there may be real family feeling there, but inconsequential speech is the major mode of communication. With my father, it was always the weather. I was contemptuous of this in college, where I made a show of searching for profound conversation, while my father unfailingly tagged a report of the local weather to the documents he forwarded me, or inquired about the temperature where I was, three hours south. And I was amused by it in my mid-twenties, when he fondly informed me that, first thing every morning, he checked the forecast in the distant cities where my brother and I lived. But finally, when I was going through a depressive period and, consequently, checked the predicted hours of sunlight each day the way a diabetic monitors her blood sugar, I began to wonder about this consistent exchange of local forecasts that still largely comprised our regular if brief phone conversations.

In a piece Samuel Johnson wrote for the Idler – the one whose first line everybody who writes anything about the weather quotes—he castigates the idea that one’s mood – indeed, one’s very constitution – could be affected or determined by the weather. “Surely nothing is more reproachful to a being endowed with reason,” he very scathingly writes, “than to resign its powers to the influence of the air, and live in dependence on the weather and the wind.” He dismisses such convictions as if they were so much astrology.[1]

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by Akim Reinhardt

It wasn’t so very long ago that some Americans held people as slaves, other human beings as their own private property, as if that person were a horse or a chair, to do with, to use, abuse, exploit, beat, and rape as they pleased. What’s more, until the late 1840s most Americans thought that slavery was acceptable. The great majority found themselves somewhere along a spectrum that at one end actually exalted slavery as a positive thing, a benefit to black people they deemed radically inferior, and at the other end said, Well, it’s a real shame, and I certainly don’t condone it or want it where I live, but what’s done is done, and I guess it isn’t the worst thing in the world, and anyway there’s nothing we can do about it now, so that’s that. And in between those two ends of the spectrum rested any number of justifications and rationalizations that people used to explain, excuse, praise, rationalize, or simply accept the reality of human bondage in their nation.

Black slaves had been owned and held in every English colony prior to the Revolution and in every U.S. state after it, the practice only ending for good in the North during the early 19th century. Indeed, before the sectional crisis that began to emerge in the 1840s, the acceptance of slavery was so widespread that there was even a small number of black slaveholders, free blacks who themselves had purchased a slave or two.

Yet here we are, in our post-civil rights world, and we find the idea of slavery to be repugnant, horrific, and wretched. How could our ancestors have found this acceptable on any level, much less have engaged in it (Obviously I’m speaking as white person here.)? So it is left to us, as future generations, to try to make sense of it and, inevitably, to judge it. To cast our squinty gaze upon them and say: What the fuck. How on earth could you have been so incredibly fucked up? I just don’t get it. You people were fucking monsters.

Or there’s the whole process of murdering Indians and stealing their lands. Let’s judge that one. Pretty easy from this distance, huh?

What about the Holocaust? Care to take a whack at whether that was really, really wrong? Go ahead. My money says you’ll agree with us.

I study the past. It’s what I do for a living. Like any historian, I strive to understand the past in a historical context and on its own terms. But as a human being, I inevitably use my own presentist sense of morality and ethics when passing judgment on it. And here’s the thing. Slavery and genocides, those are easy for us now. Yeah, super wrong, we get it. But who would you have been back then, in the moment? We all want to believe that we would have been the person working to free slaves through the underground railroad, or living peaceably with Indians, or smuggling Jews out of Europe. But guess what? You wouldn’t have. Or at least, it’s not very likely. No, odds are, you would’ve been some douche bag who justified it with mealy mouthed excuses, or laid low and avoided talking about such unpleasantness. Why? I’ll tell you why.

Because when crazy shit is the norm, the lunatic fringe are the ones who embrace the right choice. If crazy is normal, then the right answer seems crazy. I’ll say it again. If crazy is the norm, then opposing it seems crazy.

Are you crazy? Are you on the fringe? I mean really on the fringe.

You know who the abolitionists were? Not to paint with too broad of a brush here, but a lot of them were religious fanatics. They were the crazies, the radicals, the ones that everyone else pointed to and said: Hey, you’re really nuts. What the hell’s wrong with you? Knock it off already. Abolitionists were the ones who regular people mocked, jeered, and cursed. They were the outsiders of their day, the lunatic fringe of the early 19th century. Slavery was normal, so a society that largely accepted slavery labeled them as crazy.

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Although, these days, my children would normally prefer to read to themselves than to have me read them a bedtime story, they both love it when I tell them stories of my family. Both my parents died before my daughters were born and so their only connection to their grandparents is through the people I conjure up with my stories. I tell them the stories my mother told me; sitting on my bed when I was home sick, she would tell me about her fights with her brother, about the family vacations to Butlins, a somewhat cheesy English vacation resort, and other stories that I would make her repeat over and over. And now my children ask me to tell them these stories, even though they can repeat them almost word for word.

Stories are important. They help us frame who we are, personally, culturally, professionally, morally. When we call up a friend and tell our latest love woes, we're telling a story; when we go for a job interview, we tell the story of our career so far. There are many types of stories, but one kind is a story that creates and shares a vision of the future, aiming to inspire people to follow the storyteller. As Steve Denning quotes in his book, The Leader's Guide to Storytelling, “Winning leaders create and use future stories to help people break away from the familiar present and venture boldly ahead to create a better future…they help others understand why and what they must do to get there.” Denning gives examples of some of the most powerful uses of future storytelling, Martin Luther King's, “I have a dream” speech and Winston Churchill's, “We shall fight them on the beaches.”

I listened to President Obama's speech on Wednesday night in Arizona; it was inspiring, moving, and heartfelt as he wove the victims' stories into a compelling narrative. He told the story of the 9-year old victim, Christine Taylor Green, urging the American people to envision a different kind of future, a future where “…our democracy is as good as Christina imagined it. I want America to be as good as she imagined it.” It was a powerful speech that, while seeming to sidestep partisan politics, instead urging all sides to abandon “the usual plane of point scoring and pettiness that drifts away in the next news cycle”, extremely effectively scored huge political points – of course. Obama was presidential, an inspirational leader.

This speech was a vivid reminder of why people voted for him in 2008. Yet, what really struck me was this thought: clearly, this man knows how to use storytelling to inspire and lead, so why didn't he do a better job of this selling healthcare and TARP (amongst other, wildly unpopular policies). Don't get me wrong, I know he tried, but somehow he seemed to never manage to strike the same notes that he did the other day. And he should have been able to.

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When most people think of back problems they think of “slipped disks” or muscle pain. That's not what has caused my stepbrother Mark's troubles. His official diagnosis is degenerative disk disease. That means exactly what it sounds like—the disks between his vertebrae that are supposed to protect the nerves and bones are slowly deteriorating. The MRI of the area makes it look like he has a broken back: it's full of jagged discontinuities; the bones in his back are pushing straight into his nerves.

This is what has led to his disability. He has trouble walking, sitting, sleeping, doing almost any activity for any length of time—not to mention living with excruciating pain. In addition, he has arthritis in his feet that has become increasingly burdensome and painful in its own right. As I mentioned in my last column, he's finally receiving some disability payments from the government, but they are barely enough to survive on. Still, the Social Security Administration requires regular visits to a doctor to confirm that the disabling condition persists. A recurring feature of Mark's doctor visits is a urine test. There's nothing about the treatment of his back problems or arthritis that actually requires a urine sample; the test is for drugs. No, Mark's not some kind of recovering drug addict. His doctor is obligated by the government to make sure he's taking his pain medication and not selling it for profit.

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When I was in my mid-twenties, I visited Costa Rica as an ecotourist. One of the more memorable field experiences was watching a small snake consume a large toad over a period of several hours. I photographed the progression of this feast at a cost of just a few mosquito bites on my head,… or so I thought. As it turned out, the snake and mosquitoes were not the only ones dining that night.

Two weeks after my return home some of the mosquito bites had not gone away. Then one morning, I felt a small movement in the bite on my right temple. Weird. Maybe I imagined it. A while later, more movement. Definitely not my imagination. I looked closely in a mirror. At the center of the bite was a small opening with a snorkel periodically emerging from it! I had read about bot flies but never imagined becoming a host.

Bot flies have an interesting life cycle. The offspring must be deposited on living mammals or birds, but the adults, being large, noisy fliers, chase down quiet-flying mosquitoes and lay their eggs on them to avoid getting swatted. When the mosquitoes get a blood meal, the eggs, in response to the host's body heat, hatch and drop onto the host. Then they burrow into a hair follicle or sweat gland, where they begin feeding. The maggots or “bots” traverse their new home with alternating contractions of rows of hooks that encircle their bodies. As parasites go, they are usually pretty good guests despite dining on your flesh. They are careful to eliminate their waste outside their burrow, which they keep antiseptic. After a few weeks of feeding, they crawl out, drop off their host, and pupate in the soil. Some time later, an adult fly emerges to mate and repeat the cycle.

My thoughts alternated between excitement and revulsion. Fearing a highly visible scar, I squeezed the “bite” and the tiny maggot popped out like a zit. So much for that.

The next day, I noticed a now familiar movement in the upper, right rear portion of my head. This area was well concealed by hair and I thought even if this things takes a big hunk of flesh, no one will see it unless I become extraordinarily bald (so far this prognostication has held, if only just barely,…). Could I nurture my guest to pupation? As a male I thought this is probably the only opportunity I will ever have for another organism nourish itself on my living flesh. I imagined the movements of the maggot in my head were analogous to the kicking that pregnant women feel from their developing fetuses. It was thrilling, humbling, and a little alarming to suddenly be a link in the food chain rather than its terminal end.

For the next week or so, I proudly showed off my offspring to anyone who was interested. Most people were horrified but a few understood my motivation. Unfortunately, as the maggot grew it became much more active and painful. An occasional nibble could make my eyes water. Eventually it began waking me if I rolled over on it in my sleep. At that point I decided to end my experiment as a host.

Luckily, one of my housemates was from Brasil where botflies are fairly common and their removal is routine. There they hold a piece of meat over the fly's breathing hole until it begins suffocating and backs out into the meat. Alternatively, they cover the hole with Vaseline and sieze the maggot as it backs out. We tried this latter technique, and as the maggot emerged, my other housemate grabbed its snorkel with tweezers and pulled. It reflexively withdrew deeper into my scalp. A tug of war ensued and the rows of hooks dug into my flesh and felt like a hot poker. The inch long maggot, slowly stretched to over four inches before finally letting go. Note: I got lucky, because if the larva tears apart, whatever remains behind can lead to a nasty infection. As a single drop of blood oozed from my scalp, I preserved the bot in vodka.

As a result of my experience, I became much more interested in parasitology as a discipline within biology, and also began to think a bit more about humanity's place in the world. For several years afterwards, I would occasionally get tingling feelings where the botfly had once dined: A reminder that, to much of life on the planet, we are merely food.

In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.

– The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

A Short History of DNA

Douglas Noel Adams was a best-selling British writer, born in 1952. (As you may have noticed, he had the distinct pleasure of having “DNA” as his initials.) He studied literature at Cambridge, UK, after being extended an invite on the basis of his essay writing. It appears he wanted to be part of the great university to join the the Footlights, an exclusive comedy club that was the springboard for many British comedians. There were various incredible opportunities that flew into Adams’ life, such as: being noticed by Python, Graham Chapman; being one of two non-Pythons to get a writing credit in Monty Python; performing with the likes of Pink Floyd (my favourite band) because he was friends with the incredible David Gilmour; and so on. More importantly, for us, was a radio-series he pitched to BBC Radio 4 in 1977, called The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

His Hitchhiker series was not constrained to only one medium, of course. It began as this radio-show, then leaked into other mediums: a television series, a stage show, a three part DC Comics series, a computer game, and a major film. More importantly it became a series of books. Being bored easily by sounds, the written-version (and computer game) is my favourite medium of Adams’ universal message of weirdness, brilliance and the overall irony of existence in an uncaring universe.

The overarching story in The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy (now shortened to H2G2) is about Arthur Dent who is a dreary British Earthman (a tautology to many). Dent is friends with Ford Prefect – who is not in fact from Guildford, as he claims but “a small planet somewhere in the vicinity of Betelgeuse.” In the beginning of the story, Earth is destroyed by horrible aliens called Vogons – who appear to be based on any Home Affairs Department anywhere in the world. They are making way for a “hyperspace bypass”; an event that mirrors Dent’s troubles in the beginning of the books where his own house is about to be destroyed to make way for a bypass. (The idea of mirroring houses and planets will return later in this essay.)

From there, Dent finds himself transported all over the universe experiencing adventures that involve: hunting couches, the true nature of humanity, the bored and postmodernist ruler of the Universe (not god), god’s Final Message to his Creation, the evils of making tea, time-travel, and, famously, a cynical bowl of petunias and the first and final thoughts of a sperm whale.

We discover fascinating details about humans in the series. For example, the Guide tells us something rather interesting about human arrogance: “on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.”

Yet, what makes these books and the whole series so important is the reflection that is thrust upon us as a species. Adams manages to deflate the petty worries and doubts of everyday human concerns by juxtaposing it to the movements and thoughts of greater, more intelligent alien-life forms: Beings who can create planets, talk to the controller of the universe, go to different dimensions and times, and so on. But throughout, he still manages to compact everyday human concerns but mock them at the same time.

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