A Paris Review-style interview with E.O. Wilson

A score of books. Two Pulitzers. Papers that defined entire fields. So why did biologist Edward O. Wilson bother writing a novel? Because people need stories, he says. Wilson hopes his fictional debut from earlier this year, Anthill—about a young man from the South, militant ants, and the coupled fate of humans and nature—will help spark a conservation revolution.

Wilson met me at his Harvard office—a three-roomed cavern at the university’s natural history museum. “Harvard treats emeritus professors very well,” he observed. He showed me part of the world’s largest collection of ant papers, and a copy of his portrait for the National Portrait Gallery in Washington. He wore a blue/black checked shirt and slouched when he sat. His sentences were criss-crossed with asides and qualifications, and he squeezed in a few startlingly good impressions. Throughout our talk he sipped iced tea—or as Wilson, a native Alabaman, might say, sweet tea. When he spilled some on the table, he swept it onto the floor with his hand. “The difference between a book review and an interview,” he mused right before we started, “is like the difference between a handshake and a shot in the back.”

Edward Wilson: Fire away, and I’ll try to get back answers of decent interest, brevity, and so on.

Sam Kean: I’ve heard you say you have a policy of never taking any vacations. Was writing this book sort of a vacation for you?

EW: I would say in one sense I never take a vacation. I never go on a fishing trip. I never go to the beach except to study the ants who live in the sand. So in that sense I’ve never taken a vacation in my life. But I consider that most of the work I’ve done in my life is one continuous vacation. I don’t know how I’ve managed to get away with being paid for what I do. Because to me it’s a constant adventure and thrill.

And I have the advantage as a scientist, especially when working on ants, to do a search wherever I go. Even when I took my family on vacations—for them—and of course, I had to have leisure time with them!—I could do research wherever we went, because ants are ubiquitous. Even if you went to the beach somewhere, there are ant species. After all, they make up more than half the biomass of all insects. And ants are found form the arctic almost to the ends of the southern continents…

But here I am, nattering on about ants. We were talking about the book. Go ahead.

SK: So did you consider the book a vacation from science or a continuation of it?

EW: All three! That is, it combined all three of my key interests. One is science. Second is conservation of biodiversity. Third, is an exciting new experience: to plunge into a different mode of thinking and writing. Although maybe I should say that the mode of thinking is really not that different.

SK: Not that different from…?

EW: Science. Because the ideal scientist, I’ve always thought, is a person who thinks like a poet (or, if you wish, a novelist), who works like a bookkeeper, and—if he’s fortunate to be able to do so—who writes like a good journalist in explaining what has been found. But the difference between the creative process and writing science is that you don’t have the bookkeeper period.

On the other hand, if you have a science base, which this book certainly does, with the ant part, you can accomplish certain things. It’s the first time anyone has written of the cycles of the ant colonies as the ants themselves experience it—as best we can understand it from the science. And I think this is the first novel—it’s certainly the first southern novel—but it’s one of the very few American novels to pay close attention to the environment. Particularly the diversity of life in the environment.

Most novelists deal with the environment in phrases like, Went through the dark woods, looking for a dark path, you know, or, Found peace in a meadow filled with beautiful blooming flowers. That’s about as far as most novelists go. What I’ve done is to make the environment—and particularly that treasured habitat that a young Raphael Semmes Cody, the hero, spends the entire book designing and scheming and fighting to save—I made it virtually a character in the novel. Treated it as an entity, the ecosystem, almost as a character. So that in a sense it comes full circle to your question: The book has a lot of science in it.
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Verizon's street poster for Inception

Ben Walters (BW) & J. M. Tyree (JMT) have been talking about movies together since 1995, often amicably. They co-wrote a critical appreciation of The Big Lebowski for The British Film Institute’s Film Classics book series. They shared notes – via email, chat, and document sharing – on Christopher Nolan's Inception, in which Leonardo DiCaprio plays Dom Cobb, a corporate spy who retrieves secrets by invading targets' dreams. JMT watched it in San Francisco and BW saw it in London.

Bath of Dreamings

JMT: Here's a mainstream picture we both looked forward to watching, Inception, Christopher Nolan’s summer hit. It's a trap to worry overly about a Hollywood blockbuster being a Hollywood blockbuster, but I feel baffled by the critical reaction. The people next to me at the multiplex were loudly oohing and ahhing over the film as though it were a display of fireworks. And since then I’ve talked to several very smart people who enjoyed the film. What did I miss?

BW: I've got to admit I'm not quite sure. Maybe people like having their legs pulled? With sumptuous production design?

JMT: The new Film Quarterly (Summer, 2010) has a thoughtful book review by Martin Fradley about the state of the contemporary film industry. It talks about Hollywood's “new auteurs” – deal-makers, producers, agents, and distributors. Maybe that's Christopher Nolan at this point, a corporate auteur, the total bundle – which is intriguing given how weird his films are.

BW: In a way I think that's the most interesting aspect of Inception – he has the clout and the industrial nous to mount a massive shaggy dog story like this. And it's certainly another exploration of his pet themes – the ways memory, identity and narrative shape our lived reality.

JMT: He doesn’t really “do” joyful moments of intimacy. Or humor.

Undone Minds

BW: No one comes to Nolan for hugs or chuckles. His films are meant to be conventionally satisfying riddle movies, by and large, within which frame he can explore more genuinely upsetting ideas of identity. When it works, it makes you question whether you actually have any right to your opinion about yourself. When it doesn't, it comes off as dull, pretentious, over-designed guff.

JMT: My frustration watching Inception was that it barely explores the fascinating pathways opened by its own premise.

BW: Yes, I had a similar feeling…

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Steven Moore is an author, a critic, and a former managing editor of Dalkey Archive Press and the Review of Contemporary Fiction. In his latest book, the first volume of The Novel: An Alternative History, Moore traces the development of long, adventurous fiction from its origin to the year 1600, paying special attention to unusual works that make innovative use of language. Colin Marshall originally conducted this interview on the public radio program and podcast The Marketplace of Ideas. [MP3] [iTunes]

It's a remark people have made about the book, and that I believe you've also made yourself: it is called The Novel: An Alternative History, but it could also be called A History of the Alternative Novel. How true is that?

In my mind, I was doing two things at once. First of all, it's an alternative to the conventional history of the novel, which begins in 18th-century England and goes up to about 1920 and then James Joyce comes along and throws a monkey wrench into everything and invents the avant-garde novel. The problem with that is, the novel actually started way back in ancient Greece, and the avant-garde novel that Joyce allegedly invented has always been a property. There's crazy, avant-garde, weird, experimental novels going back almost to the very beginning. I'm writing about these ancient works, but all along I'm defending modern, innovative fiction, which often gets a bad rap. I want to point out that these modern avant-garde things are not deviations from the norm, but have always been part of the novel.

This opens up a big issue of just how it's come to be that a traditional history of the novel has become so narrow. This book of yours, the first part ends well before the traditional history begins. How much do you have to modify the “normal” definition of the novel to go back as far as you do.

It depends on what you mean by normal. The dictionary, and E.M. Forster in his famous Aspects of the Novel, says that a novel is any work of fiction longer than 50,000 words, or any book-length work of fiction. If you take that as your definition, you can go back as far as I do. However, you're right, some modern critics want to narrow that down to: a novel has to be realistic, it has to have a certain amount of psychological depth, it has to be set against a recognizable social or economic background, et cetera, et cetera. Why they want to do that, I don't know. I gues they wanted to distinguish the novel written by Flaubert or Henry James from something written in the Middle Ages, so they've come up with all these notions. If you just go by a basic definition, which most would agree, that a novel is just a book-length work of fiction, that opens all sorts of possibilities.

Someone who isn't familiar with this talk about what defines a novel, I'm sure they'll be surprised when they read your book, especially the introduction. They'll find out that, indeed, there has been some argument over what constitutes a proper novel. How closely were you following that before you set into this enormous project, the history of the novel?

I wasn't so much following arguments about the novel as I was simply noticing, throughout my life, that I kept stumbling across these older works of fiction that looked like novels to me, even though that's not what I learned in college. In college, the novel started in the 18th century. In bookstores, I would come across The Tale of Genji, an ancient Japanese novel, or Petronius' Satyricon, which comes from the very first century, or an Icelandic saga like Nial's Saga. I would look at them and say, well, this is fiction, book-length. They certainly looked like novels. I was responding to that, rather than following the academic debates that have been going on for the last century or two.

Starting this project, at what point in your research were you able to find a beginning for works that look like novels, to your own mind?

I knew there were ancient Greek novels. I'd seen a big fat book published by the University of California press called The Collected Ancient Greek Novels. Then I realized Nietzsche once compared Plato's dialogues to early novels, and I thought that was interesting. I came across a book of ancient Egyptian tales, and there's some ancient Egyptian scholars who say these are pretty much novels in everything but name; they have all the properties of novels. It was just looking at ancient fiction, which I've always had a slight interest in, and realizing a lot of those early writings had a lot of properties of the novel. Of course, there was no such thing as the novel per se then, so they were never labeled as such, but if you treat them as the fictional adventures of some character going through a set of dramatic sequences, which is what most novels are, you can look at something like Gilgamesh and say, “Yeah, this resembles a novel,” even though that's not what the author may have set out to do.

What about the earliest fictions you include in the book fascinate you the most?

The daring of them. This goes back to your first question about alternative fiction. These early fictions, especially Egyptian and Assyrian stuff, they're almost like avant-garde magical realist novels. They're more like García Marquez than John Updike, say. The freedom I saw there really interests me. This is the same freedom avant-garde writers adopt. As soon as literature started becoming written, critics came up with rules for poetry and drama. Anyone who was writing tales or longer fictions were pretty much free to do whatever they wanted. There was this real spirit of experimentalism, to use a modern term, in that early fiction, that fit in perfectly with my whole thesis: the avant-garde novel is not a modern aberration, but goes all the way back to the beginning. If anything, the conventional novel is the aberration. That's a very late development.

Could you say that we have it backwards, that what we see as normal is one current of many in terms of the way the novel has gone? We've focused so much on one subset, that has seemed to us to be the only thing?

Exactly. Without question, it's the most popular form of fiction, the conventional novel, the beginning, middle, end, and all that. It's the easiest to read, has the largest appeal, blah, blah, blah. But when you step back and look at the whole stream from ancient Egypt to what's being written now, it's just a tributary that goes off to the side. I wouldn't push it too hard, but the experimental novel is actually the main river. The conventional novel is a popular sidetrack.

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by Michael Blim

A bag of books for two bucks, said the sign. Deflation has hit the little Connecticut country library used book sales I haunt each summer. Imagine what you can stuff into a big supermarket paper bag, and then cross-rough it with a run of terrific books – a book of Giotto’s frescoes, Graham Greene’s The Comedians, three P.D. James mysteries, George F. Kennan’s Russia and the West under Lenin and Stalin, a compilation of comic art propaganda that includes a study and pictures of Hansi: the Girl Who Loved the Swastika (the protagonist escapes Nazism by becoming a bride for Christ). All of these and A Guide to Thomas Aquinas.

All of these books bid for my affections, hoping for a quick conquest of my summer reading plans. Having laid hands on Robert Sherwood’s Hopkins and Roosevelt (1948) my fate was sealed. And fortunately for me, having spent as 3QD readers know the past two summers on first Hitler and then Stalin thanks to my library sales book buys.

What a delight to read the history of heroes once more. Sherwood tells the story of how Roosevelt and Hopkins, FDR’s alter ego insofar as he ever had one, battled the Great Depression and World War II together, with Hopkins the iron fist in Roosevelt’s velvet glove. The story is told with admiration and a beguiling humility. Though a successful playwright and a speechwriting White House denizen from 1940 onward, Sherwood never lost his awe of the two men, sharing intimate space and time with two persons who never shared their intimate thoughts with anyone.

Sherwood’s sense of wonder at what he observed is perhaps only exceeded by the reactions of a sympathetic reader. Hopkins, an Iowa-born New York social worker, put 4 million people to work in one month during the dark winter of 1933-34 and got 180,000 public works projects up and running in four. He put millions more to work with the Works Progress Administration, and after 1937 with half a stomach and successions of near-death crises due to chronic metabolic diseases left over after his bout with cancer, ran the Lend-Lease program that put ships, planes, tanks, and arms in the hands of a half a dozen of America’s allies in World War II and acted as FDR’s confidential agent with Churchill, Stalin, and their military and diplomatic staffs.

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“Black holes, Big Bang, Bada Bing, quantum space, worm holes, the Theory of Strings; space is a smorgasbord of metaphors of things.” –Roshi Bob, The Theory of Theories and Other Anomalies; Bench Press, 2011

Fun in Space
………………..
Call me nomad, but
rootlessness is my routine

From where I stand
space seems to beg for exploration
not occupation. Occupation of space
requires a military state of mind
Armies are trained for it. Individuals however,
grow dull and lethargic just occupying space

There’s no substitute for dynamism
when facing space

When I stumble upon a new chunk
I like to engage it many times over
laying out alternate trajectories
bisecting circles
flying off on tangents
or just nosing around looking for
shortcuts

If the wind’s right you might catch me
boogalooing along an hypotenuse
or oscillating between the foci of an ellipse
I go at it from all angles by any means

For example I’ve found a trampoline’s
a satisfying way to explore space:
up, down, up, down
Along similar lines (if you have the money)
a space shuttle is good too:
up, down, up, down

There are various ways to approach space
We can grid it off and tackle it one little corner at a time
or go at it whole, working it as Jackson Pollock would a canvas
What we choose depends upon our depth of indoctrination
or degree of personality disorder

Whatever our milieu, space can be an exhilarating place
–or is it places?

In fact space is full of surprises
(moving beyond bland Euclidean space that is;
the plainest of all geometries)
Still, you gotta hand it to the guy
Euclid’s space may be old hat,
but it’s a space that’s served us well over the years
Try getting from here to there without it

But what really psyches me
are novel topologies of space
There’s nothing more exhilarating
then space that pushes the envelope

Consider the quirky but tasty appeal of a torus
(the deep-fried cuisine of crime-stoppers),
the intriguing infinity of a Möbius strip,
or the warm and cozy feel
inside a conversation-laced pub
These are boundary-pushing spaces all, but
they’re nothing
up against the reality-bending possibilities
of warped space as given by Einstein
and can’t hold a candle
to the almost mystically
tangled theory of strings

Just the thought of Einsteinian or string space
neutralizes any residual sense of metaphysical claustrophobia
left over from grade-school catechism
under hard nuns

Me? I never miss the chance to savor space
With six point eight billion of us on the planet,
at our present rate of consumption,
you never know when
we might run out

by Jim Culleny
June 2007

Marriage can mean many different things to different people. For some, it’s all about the wedding – often an event with the pomp and opulence of a fairy tale ball. For others, it’s about the legal arrangement and the accompanying benefits, which could mean anything from health insurance to citizenship. Still for others, the most important part may be the commitment to sharing a life together.

In recent decades, the issue of gay marriage has been widely debated. Should two men in a committed relationship enjoy the same benefits as a man and a woman in the same domestic arrangement? If it were simply an issue of basic human rights and equality, then the answer is clear – gays and lesbians are human, so human rights should apply. But gay marriage violates tradition, and tradition is important to many people.

Traditions are part of our history, part of our culture, and part of who we are. The degree to which we suffer to maintain traditions reflects their great importance. Maintaining tradition has been worth the pain of genital mutilation, ceremonial scarring, and foot binding. Nevertheless, traditional practices have been disappearing steadily. For example, in many places, women are now considered full persons. They’re allowed to work outside the home, to wear pants, and to vote. For those who value tradition, this is a trend that must stop.

One might argue that traditional practices should be abandoned when they no longer make sense. But as French mathematician Blaise Pascal recognized, the heart has its reasons that reason doesn’t understand. Some things are simply more important than reason, and for many, tradition is one of them.

If there is any doubt about the appropriateness or morality of same-sex marriages, we can always turn to religion for answers. According to many religions, marriage is supposed to be between a man and a woman. The woman is supposed to stay at home and be subservient and they should have lots of children. Some religions also advocate putting people to death for minor deviations from the traditional paradigm. Roman Catholicism seems to be tolerant of some deviations, like pedophilia, but not others, like homosexuality or the use of contraception.

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By Tolu Ogunlesi

1.

Africa their Africa

When Western tourists talk about Africa somehow it seems to me that what they really mean is East and Southern Africa, places like Namibia and Kenya and Botswana and parts of Uganda where you will find safaris and zebras and elephants and lakes in abundance.

When I think of Tourists' Africa I almost never think of Nigeria. Tourists stay away from a country like Nigeria – those masses of foreigners to be seen at the arrival terminal of the Lagos International Airport (MMIA) are diplomats and NGO-types and oil workers and journalists and researchers, and maybe spies. (And of course the occasional ‘Nigerian letter’ victim desperately hoping to recover a lost fortune). For most of them there will be the lure of money to be made / earned – as hardship allowance or crazy business profit. Nigeria is one country where foreigners come to make money, not fritter it away on guided tours and lakeside resorts.

In the Congo they will be aid workers and diamond-seeking businessmen and gorilla savers; ditto the Sudan (minus the gorilla-savers and businessmen). In Liberia and Sierra Leone they will be IMF and World Bank officials. In Guinea Bissau they will mostly be cocaine merchants and US drug enforcement agents.

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by Frans de Waal

For many years, anthropologists and biologists have been comparing the aggression of animals with human warfare. It started with Konrad Lorenz in the 1960s, and remains a popular endeavor. We have an aggressive instinct that leads to warfare, hence war will always be with us. This message was a bit hard to accept from Lorenz, an Austrian who served in the German army during WWII, but the debate continues as seen in the video above featuring interviews with Steven Pinker, Richard Wrangham, and myself.

Part of the problem is that modern warfare seems to have little to do with the raw aggressive instinct. Modern warfare rests on a tight hierarchical structure of many parties, not all of which are driven by aggression. In fact, most are just following orders. The decision to go to war is typically made by older men in the capital. When I look at a marching army, I don’t see aggression in action. I see the herd instinct: thousands of men in lock-step, willing to obey superiors.

In recent history, we have seen so much war-related death that we imagine that it must always have been like this, that warfare is written into our DNA. In the words of Winston Churchill: “The story of the human race is War. Except for brief and precarious interludes, there has never been peace in the world; and before history began, murderous strife was universal and unending.” But is Churchill’s warmongering state-of-nature any more plausible than Rousseau’s noble savage? Although archeological signs of individual murder go back hundreds of thousands of years, we lack similar evidence for warfare (such as graveyards with weapons embedded in a large number of skeletons) from before the agricultural revolution. Even the walls of Jericho — considered one of the first pieces of evidence of warfare and famous for having come tumbling down in the Old Testament — may have served mainly as protection against mudflows.

Long before this, our ancestors lived on a thinly populated planet, with altogether only a couple of million people. Before this, about 70,000 years ago, our lineage was at the edge of extinction living in scattered small bands. A study of mitochondrial DNA by genographer Doron Behar suggests: “Tiny bands of early humans developed in isolation from each other for as much as half of our entire history as a species.” These are hardly the sort of conditions to promote continuous warfare. My guess is that for our ancestors war was always a possibility, but that they followed the pattern of present-day hunter-gatherers, who do exactly the opposite of what Churchill surmised: they alternate long stretches of peace and harmony with brief interludes of violent confrontation.

Comparisons with apes hardly resolve this issue. Since it has been found that chimpanzees sometimes raid their neighbors and take their enemies’ lives, these apes have edged closer to the warrior image that we have of ourselves. Like us, chimps wage violent battles over territory. Genetically speaking, however, our species is exactly equally close to another ape, the bonobo, which does nothing of the kind. Bonobos can be unfriendly to their neighbors, but soon after a confrontation has begun, females often rush to the other side to have sex with both males and other females. Since it is hard to have sex and wage war at the same time, the scene rapidly turns into a peaceful gathering. Lethal aggression among bonobos has been unheard of.

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Justin E. H. Smith

*

Books consulted for this essay:

John Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century. 8th Edition. University of Chicago Press, 2005.

Robin Fox, Kinship and Marriage: An Anthropological Perspective. Cambridge University Press, 1967.

Maurice Godelier, Les métamorphoses de la parenté. Paris, Fayard, 2004.

Lewis Henry Morgan, Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family. London, 1871.

Martha C. Nussbaum, From Disgust to Humanity: Same-Sex Marriage and Constitutional Law. Oxford University Press, 2010.

Andrew Sullivan, Virtually Normal. An Argument About Homosexuality. Vintage, 1996.

Göran Therborn, Between Sex and Power: Family in the World, 1900-2000, Routledge, 2004.

*

I recently spelled out some of the reasons why I remain doubtful about the prospects for transforming marriage, worldwide, into a gender-indifferent institution. (It is only the worldwide perspective that interests me.) I have not heard, in reply, any substantive arguments against the reasons I give for my doubts, and I have therefore decided that it might be a good idea to try one more time, and this time to make my call for serious engagement more explicit. I would sincerely like to know whether there is something I am missing.

I have been alarmed to see a sort of orthodoxy emerge as if out of nowhere over just the past few years (many of you will be old enough to remember when, in the not-so-distant past, Andrew Sullivan was condemned as a betrayer and a domesticator of the gay spirit for his powerful defense of same-sex marriage in Virtually Normal; I hope no one will try to tell me that everyone who condemned him at the time was, wittingly or un-, an enemy of human rights). This orthodoxy, like its opposite and indeed like all orthodoxies, presumes that any questioning of it amounts to hostility. There is no room in either of the prevailing orthodoxies that have formed around the controversy over same-sex marriage for someone like me: someone who supports marriage equality, but doubts, based on a thorough but admittedly incomplete reading of historical and anthropological scholarship, that the concept of marriage is in fact flexible enough to ever be transformed in such a way that marriage will cease to be heterosexual by presumption.

That is, I believe that we are right to decide to make same-sex unions equal before the law, but that it is not up to us to decide that the primary meaning of 'marriage' will cease to be 'basic unit of kinship, involving the monogamous pair-bonding of a male and a female'. This meaning will remain primary not only because other-sex couples are, as everyone agrees, statistically more common than same-sex couples, but because there is a fairly rigid system of organization in societies throughout the world that continues to be based on a presumption of gender dimorphism, and that continues to take cross-gender pairings as the elementary units of social reality. This is not what I want (I personally couldn't be less interested in 'defending' traditional marriage, though as it happens I don't think it's going to need defending), but rather what I believe to be the case.

I also believe that the movement for marriage equality misunderstands its contingency and ignores the historical forces that brought it into being. One of the triggers of my coming-out as a skeptic occurred a few months ago, when I happened to be speaking with a group of acquaintances who are also outspoken defenders of marriage equality. When quite unexpectedly the topic of first-cousin marriage came up, they began snickering like little boys: like little boys I might add, who in the not so distant past found mirth in every occurrence of the word 'gay'. This caused me to note that there is a certain selectiveness in what counts among educated Western liberals as 'doing the right thing' (a phrase we hear so often, and have heard most recently in connection with the legalization of same-sex marriage in Argentina).

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By Usha Alexander

“In your marriage, who is the boss?” our driver, Arman, asked in a playfully provocative tone, like he was setting up the punchline of a joke.

My partner and I looked at each other, laughed, and shrugged. Arman belonged to the Minangkabau, the society recognized among anthropologists as the world’s largest and most stable surviving matriarchy* (though some prefer to call it a gylany, matrix, matrifocal or matricentric society, or something else to avoid conjuring images of mythical Amazons). Knowing this, I presumed his question was part of a routine entertainment for tourists.

“For us it is the woman who is boss,” he continued, predictably. “The woman has all the privileges; she owns everything. The men, we own nothing.”

I knew that the Minangkabau, like most Indonesians, are Muslims. In May 2009, one of the first things I noticed upon arriving in their homeland—a stretch of volcanic highlands running along the western coast of Sumatra—was that a higher percentage of women here wear the hijab (here called jilbab) than did further north, near Medan and around Lake Toba. In fact, well over half of the adult women covered their hair in public. But here, as elsewhere on Sumatra, the headscarf appears to be as much a fashion statement as a covering for modesty. It’s often brightly colored or festooned with beads, sequins, rhinestones, small brooches, lace, or shimmery ribbons. Many women sport styles with a dainty sun visor in the front. Pretty much anything you can do to a hat is done to the Sumatran jilbab.

These observations, and Arman’s good humor at his lack of patrimony, made me wonder how I should understand the Minangkabau matriarchaat (their word, borrowed from the Dutch). What truce had been struck between Islam and matriarchy?

§

In the small villages surrounding Mount Marapi, which lies at the center of the Minangkabau creation myths, Arman lead us down tangled lanes lined with traditional Minangkabau homes. Many of these were great wooden structures, some as much as 300 years old, tattered or rotting in places, patched or expanded upon over the years. These traditional homes are long, each enclosing a broad rectangular hall over an empty ground floor, once used to house livestock. Their roofs are arched to suggest the horns of a buffalo. There were newer dwellings too, without the ground floor for livestock, with SUVs parked out front, satellite dishes growing like mushrooms of modernity from balconies and awnings.

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by Aditya Dev Sood

I was riding the 2/3 to Brooklyn the first couple of days I was back, when I saw this guy in a baggy pair of shorts, a T-shirt, and these kinda shoes I’d never seen before. They wrapped around each toe, exposing the toes basically, through the thin skin of the shoe. Years ago, I remember reading a children’s encyclopedia on Surrealist Art, where I saw a charcoal drawing of an empty pair of boots with laces whose burnished, buffeted folds drew further and further down to reveal toes. There was something spectral and scary about the catch in the mind, which confused shoe for feet, with the after-image of the even grosser idea that the skin of one’s feet might someday serve as the boots of another. These bizarre shoe-things with toes brought all that to mind and more. The mind understood sandals, it understood shoes, but these things were total genre busters – like the Sporks of footwear. They were somehow unseemly, uncanny, desirable. I had to have ‘em!

I got online and found myself bang in the middle of a cultural revolution, where running is the leitmotif for a responsible and contemporary lifestyle. As many readers will already know, recent studies have suggested that human form emerges as a result of endurance running, whereby our distant ancestors ran and walk their prey to exhaustion and ultimate death. While we humans can easily be outclassed in a sprint and overwhelmed in a full frontal attack at close quarters, our intellect and genius for tracking was able to manifest a potentially overwhelming evolutionary advantage at long distances and over longer periods of time. Also relevant are recent pop-anthropological studies of Meso-American tribes who can still be observed running and hunting over long distances barefoot, perhaps evidence that we humans truly are born to run.

While there’s a small and growing sub-culture of barefoot runners these days, there’s also the view that this is a sure track to contracting Hepatitis C. This is because enough people have it, and enough of them are urinating out and about the city, so it is only a matter of time and chance for the moment when you have a cut on the palm of your foot, which becomes infected. But even in rural and remote regions of the world, walking or running barefoot can be a high-risk activity, exposing the body to hookworm, podoconiosis, and other neglected tropical diseases. Seen from this perspective, the shoe is a prophylactic, protecting the body from the diseases that may be locked into the loam of the earth. The goal of further design and innovation in shoes, therefore, should be to afford the flexibility and sensation of going bareback, while still ensuring that users enjoy safe sports.

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Blame the Victims and Make Them Feel Guilty – Part 2

Part 1 of “Blame the Victims and Make Them Feel Guilty” can be found HERE.

{Synopsis of Part 1}

Benedict XVI, Supreme Pontiff of the Catholic Church, visited the United States in April of 2008. He addressed the sexual abuse of children in the American Catholic Church, but never once, in his public homily at The Nationals Stadium in Washington, D. C., did he say or indicate that the abuse was committed by members of the clergy and religious congregations.

Two months later, George Weigel, Catholic theologian, public intellectual, and official biographer of Pope John Paul II, gave an interview on Book TV's “In Depth,” aired on C-SPAN 2.

“I was not so much disappointed with Weigel, as bewildered by his complete lack of understanding the nature and consequences of child sex abuse; he does not understand what is involved in treating victims of child sex crimes; and he doesn't have any semblance of insight into the psychology of the perpetrators of child sex crimes.”

Weigel failed to see that what he calls, “grave errors of judgment,” and “irresponsibility” on the part of many bishops “…are really manifestations of criminal behavior, psychopathy, behavioral and mental disorders, narcissism, selfishness, a sociopath's belief that rules don't apply to them, sinful disregard for the spiritual well being of the faithful, sinful failure as shepherds who should protect their flock from harm, and pure self interest.”

He goes on to say, with little subtlety, that victims of clergy sex abuse are crippling the Catholic Church in America, driving it toward bankruptcy, and will bring about the end of all catholic education, hospitals, and social programs in the United States. The victims may very well end up burdening the U. S. tax payers with huge social costs or may cause national social programs to reduce services.

George Weigel doesn't stop there. He burdens the victims with more guilt, because they are helping their undeserving attorneys get rich. He would like victims to feel guilty about using the U. S. civil tort justice system, in order to get compensation for their losses. He says the victims are using an unfair justice system that doesn't work because citizen juries (the conscience of the court) do not work. He suggests that it is typical for millions of dollars to be awarded for frivolous claims, and cites a complete untruth and fabrication to support his view.

Weigel makes a not-too-veiled and sickening proposal that some victims may not be worth the money, and shouldn't get a monetary damage award, if society determines that they are so damaged they can't be 'fixed' by a monetary judgment.

I did not say this in Part 1, but I say it here: Weigel seemed to me to prefer that the Church efforts, particularly financial, to help victims should be reserved for those who still love the Church. In my view, this is offering help only to those who pass a loyalty test, and discards those so ravaged by the clergy that they lost their faith in the Church and in their religion. The most severely injured get the least help – maybe none.

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David Lipsky is a contributing editor at Rolling Stone and the author of Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace. Crafted out of transcripts of a five day-long conversation between Lipsky and Wallace on the tail end of the publicity tour for Wallace’s breakthrough novel Infinite Jest, the book reveals facets of the beloved author that have never before been seen publicly. Colin Marshall originally conducted this interview on the public radio program and podcast The Marketplace of Ideas. [MP3] [iTunes]

I want to tell you one thing I imagine about the creation of this book. Tell me if it's right or wrong. As the listener probably knows by now, this book is made out of transcripts of tapes you recorded while you were on the road with David Foster Wallace for five days during his publicity tour for his big novel in '96 Infinite Jest.

Yeah, it was a lot of fun.

It sounds like it. You didn't end up writing the article that these notes were for, a Rolling Stone profile. That got canceled. So you had these laying around, I presume, stored somewhere. I would imagine, after David Foster Wallace's untimely death in 2008, your mind went immediately to these materials, all this conversation you had with Wallace. I imagine a huge, crushing sense of responsibility. You're thinking, “I've got to do something with themes, but what?” Is that accurate at all?

Well, no — it's interesting, but when I first heard that he had died, like a lot of people, I didn't think it was true. I got an e-mail from a friend, and I assumed it was a prank. Spending time with David, what you have a sense of is just how mentally healthy he was. If you had asked me in the summer of 2008 to name the most healthy, mentally, American writer, I would have without any hesitation, said David Wallace. He just seemed like he'd gone through something when he was younger, but he seemed healed. He seemed like someone who had a wise, funny, sharp way of looking at life, which would tend to make you live longer, not less long. I was shocked. My first response was just tremendous surprise.

You saw this health in him. Is that just from your experience with him in '96, traveling for a few days, getting the first-person encounter, or was that from his work as well?

It was from both. I only knew him for those five days, and in the five days what you read us talking about is just how he'd gone a very hard time when he was in his late twenties, and had found a way to experience the world after that. That was what I had been reading in his work, and what I'd then read in his work afterwards. The person who writes a story like “Good Old Neon”, the person who writes nonfiction like “A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again” or “Consider the Lobster”, is not somebody who hasn't had hardships or wouldn't know how to go through it. Somebody who has, in the full way of a life, tested themselves against hardship and come out with a kind of warm comic knowledge. That was one of the things you love about his work. That's one of the things readers always feel: he has seen all the crap stuff, all the hard stuff they've seen, but he's also still incredibly aware, incredibly alive and incredibly funny.

The story you mention, “Good Old Neon” — it's gotten a lot of re-reading in the wake of Wallace's death simply because of the character it describes. There's this character that goes toward an end by his own hand in the story, and it even holds up a character called David Wallace who has avoided that. You think of other stories like “The Depressed Person”, an illustration of this phenomenon of depression that it's now revealed he suffered from himself.

There seems to be so much there than indicates David Wallace understands all these problems and has somehow transcended them. I think of that as a big paradox of his life and how he wound up. Is that the same way you think about it? There's all this understanding, but he ultimately did succumb to the same thing it seemed he had a grasp on.

I did, and when I read “Good Old Neon” when it came out in book form in 2005 — I'm not a crying reader, but that's one of the only short stories I read and cried at the end of, because of this beautiful line when the narrator becomes David and says, “David Wallace emerging from years of literally indescribable war with himself, won with considerably more intellectual firepower than he had in high school in 1982. I felt that.

That's one of the nice things of spending time with someone: I knew what he was talking about. I felt this great sense of power and health in that line. As a reader, I felt that thing of what a life is, which is that someone who is awake and aware — the kinds of people who like to read, the kinds of people who turn to books to find a little bit more about their lives — they've all gone through that kind of internal, internecine conflict. To see him saying that — I hadn't seen him, then, for almost ten years — I felt very warm for him.
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Moral philosophers spend a good bit of their time reflecting on what they call moral dilemmas. It is not entirely clear—nothing in philosophy is ever entirely clear—how to characterize them. But the usual course is to consider a case in which an agent is faced with two courses of action, only one of which can be chosen, and are such that there seem to be compelling reasons for each choice. By itself this would seem to be just a hard case; one in which the reasons are roughly equivalent and it is difficult to tell which set of reasons is stronger. But some philosophers claim that the situation can be much worse than this. It can be the case that the reasons are such that neither set over-rides the other. Or at least that with resources available for thought we cannot make such a determination. A consequence of this is supposed to be that no matter what we do we will be doing something wrong or failing to do something that we are required to do.

Examples abound in the literature. Sartre’s case of the student who wants to join the resistance but has an aging mother who lives with, and depends, on him. Sophie’s Choice to pick which of her two children will be killed by the Nazi concentration camp guard. If she refuses to pick one , both will be killed. Recently, I ran across a book—The Lone Survivor—which is an account of a group of Navy Seals on a mission in Afghanistan told by the only survivor of a failed mission. It presents an account of a moral choice that this group of four men had to make. The case is interesting to think about since it raises a number of different issues which are relevant to the theoretical notion of a moral dilemma, as well as the practical issue of how to think about such difficult and terrible choices.

The four men set out on a mission to try and locate a local Taliban leader – the head of a heavily armed group of Taliban. They do not know what village he is in so plan to remain concealed in some appropriate spot on a sparsely covered high-up mountain until they spot him and attempt to kill him. They discover such a spot and remain concealed, and still, for many hours in the hot sun. If they are spotted from above they are dead ducks. But the area above them seems completely empty. After many hours they hear a noise of soft footsteps above them and a man, wearing a turban and carrying an ax almost stumbles over them. They point their rifles at him and tell him to sit down when suddenly a flock of goats comes trotting up the mountain accompanied by two other men–more precisely one man and a boy around fourteen years old. All three men are distinctly unfriendly—which might be explained by discovering a heavily armed group of soldiers camped out on their farm.

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When I set out to write a book on all the great and hidden stories on the periodic table, I figured I’d have to delve into some strange and uncomfortable history. There was the inevitable brush with the alchemists, and humankind’s almost instinctual lust for gold and silver. I even ended up mapping out the elements on the periodic table, to reflect the intellectual currents of the past few centuries. What I didn’t expect was how relevant all that history would seem today, how often the same themes would come up again and again in current events and the news. But if it’s anything, the periodic table is still a microcosm for understanding all the wonderful and horrible things about the world.

I had reason to think of this last month when McDonalds recalled over 13 million Shrek-themed drinking glasses after discovering in them high levels of cadmium, element forty-eight. Cadmium can undoubtedly be one of the most beautiful elements—it has a long history in art as a pigment, and helped old masters produce vibrant colors no other substances of the time could. Even today, some shades—like cadmium yellow—retain the name.

But as the famous biologist Edward O. Wilson once said “In the natural world, beautiful usually means deadly.” Wilson was referring to how the brightest colored snakes, frogs, and insects usually harbor the deadliest venoms. But his wisdom applies equally well to the periodic table. Cadmium is one of the more poisonous elements on the table, and has one of its most notorious histories. Yet we keep making the same mistakes with it again and again. In fact, the first widespread recall of consumer goods with cadmium also involved drinking glasses. (Plus ça change…)

Cadmium sits below zinc on the periodic table, which means pure cadmium looks and acts like zinc, including having the same shiny finish as zinc. So, in the 1940s, some manufacturers decided to plate drinking glasses with cadmium and sell them in department stores.

This was bad enough—some atoms of cadmium would naturally slough off every time somebody filled the glass—but became a big problem when summer rolled around and people began drinking fruit juices like lemonade. These acidic juices scraped cadmium atoms off the cup’s surface in droves, and people around America fell ill with intense pain and diarrhea. McDonalds didn’t line its Shrek glasses with cadmium—it was used in the brightly colored paints on the outside, calculated to attract children’s attentions. But in recalling the line, the fast-food company cited the same fear of children ingesting cadmium while they drank.

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By Maniza Naqvi

When the sun sets over the river turning its waters the color of molten gold and then liquid black, like the uninterrupted, robust, gush that flows at the gas pump— then, —when you are alone in the confused maze of your thoughts of hatred and hubris –then— now that you have time on your hands, to fish, does the writing of a story occupy you? Because you would need to tell it won’t you? Sentence it in the way you want to? Flesh out the outlines of yet another murder most foul? Surely you do. Now that you have the perfect view for it: of a place where the hangman’s noose brought its cruel justice for the punishment of an assassin’s crime. Do you wonder about the quakes, the spewing of ash and how the earth has shuddered? Author of assassinations, do you hear the sound of anguish carried to you on the evening breeze as the earth stirs and the waters gurgle? It is a mother’s grief and a mother’s wrath. When the waters turn black, she weeps: This is my body, this is my blood. Now you in your defeat, weep, now you suffer. Do you hear her? It is Tomyris sending you a message. Do you know her? How could you? For you have always defended empire—not those who have fought against it.

Tomyris the queen of the Massagetae lived with her people in her homeland north of the Amu Darya. In 530 B.C Cyrus the Great prepared to occupy her lands and as a pretext offered to marry her. She turned him down. What need was there for marriage? The Massagetae held as sacred the secret of nature: they understood the intricate connection between individual choice and advantage to society. Each woman had one husband, but she slept with anyone of her choosing.

Upon her refusal, his ruse made useless, Cyrus prepared to attack and invade the Massagetae. A messenger carried her warning to him: “King of the Medes, cease to press this enterprise, for you cannot know if what you are doing will be of real advantage to you. Be content to rule in peace your own kingdom, and bear to see us reign over the countries that are ours to govern’. His-story tries to erase them—the warriors the defenders the defeaters of blood thirsty cruel men.

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by Randolyn Zinn

This past spring I arranged to meet Karen Swenson at The Century Club in Manhattan. As I climbed McKim, Mead and White’s splendid marble Beaux Arts staircase to the second floor, I saw her sitting at the far side of the library, catching up with The New York Times. Her long braid was wound in a tight chignon and she was dressed in red from head to toe—a chic wrap dress, tights and shoes to match, even her self-designed down coat was tinted a rich cerise. I thought, is this the same woman who leads Southeast Asian treks in sneakers and corduroys two months out of each year for the last 27?

A native New Yorker, Karen told me she was in town only briefly before winging off to Europe, having recently sold her Manhattan apartment. Her fondest wish was to relocate to a city boasting an opera house and a major airport. Two contenders remained: Venice and Barcelona (the eventual winner).

Her poems have been published by The New Yorker and many literary journals, as well as Saturday Review. Her latest book, her fifth, is entitled A PILGRIM INTO SILENCE. Because she is a world traveler, articles on the subject of sojourning have been enjoyed by those who read The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. Recently she has taught at both her alma maters, Barnard and NYU.

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