Recently I had the pleasure of listening to historian Dr. Wayne Flynt speak at my local library, drawing from his new book, Afternoons with Harper Lee. As with Mockingbird Songs, a collection of letters exchanged between himself and the famed author, this memoir grows out of Flynt’s and his wife Dartie’s long friendship with the Monroeville native. Afternoons takes its name from the Flynts’ afternoon visits with Lee in the care center she lived the last years of her life in following a stroke in her adopted city of New York. The memoir combines a personable Harper Lee biography with a messy account of the Flynt-Lee friendship, along with musings on the meaning of To Kill a Mockingbird and Go Set a Watchman. Although I’ve been dubious about Watchman since its release and have never read it because of my suspicions that its publication was done over the head of its declining author, Flynt’s conversations with Lee here indicate that she’d finished it in 1957, but that it simply hadn’t been published. Even more interestingly, she penned a third work, a true crime piece about a Baptist preacher who was popularly regarded as a serial killer who’d only escaped justice through voodoo until he met a vigilante gunman. The manuscript, never submitted for publication because of fear of legal suits, was lost over the years. Go Set a Watchman, Flynt suggests, depicted Lee’s own youthful innocence dying. Atticus Finch was the unparalleled hero of Mockingbird, but in Watchman the young adult Scout has to witness her father making compromises to prevent worse evils. While Flynt’s lecture suggested Lee had come to terms with this, in the book itself she comes off as more permanently disaffected about her father, and bitter about the South and Monroeville in general. Flynt reiterates although Lee often presented herself as a cantankerous recluse, she was warm and funny to those she admitted into her trust. She made for difficult company as a reader, but I was drawn to this out of interest in what it might reveal about Watchman and her friendship with the legendary oral historian Kathryn Tucker Windham. The book delivers substance about the former but only a brief mention of the latter.
Which is more breathtaking, the power of the atom bomb or the hubris of governments that use it? Michon Mackedon’s Bombast will leave readers wondering. It reviews the approach of the Atomic Energy Commission to organizing and testing a succession of increasingly more powerful bombs from the Marshall Islands to Nevada, looking at the use of language in particular to frame this testing as innocuous and positive (“bigger bombs for a brighter tomorrow”, to borrow from another history related to this subject). Despite its small pagecount, the book has the heft of a textbook, and sometimes the prose quality of one: it’s not technical, but far more academic than ‘popular’, and will be of interest primarily to those obsessed with the early atomic age. It has much to say on the cold-blooded way the state treats those are in the way of its aims, as well as the means through which dissenters’ concerns are made to look ridiculous, ignorant, and unpatriotic.
There were legitimate fears in the 1940s that the initial test of the nuclear bomb might cause a chain reaction capable of igniting the atmosphere: that the test continued says much about the stakes and excitement around nuclear weaponry’s potential. During World War 2, bombing raids against cities like Hamburg, Berlin, and Schweinfurt would consisted of scores, hundreds, and (in the case of Cologne) a thousand bombers — but the Bomb promised to drastically reduce the number of airplanes and more valuable airmen at risk. Although Hiroshima and Nagasaki demonstrated the destructive potential of the bomb more than adequately to the world, these initial mechanisms were crude: more sophisticated and potent delivery systems were being created, and they needed to be tested — both their scope, and their array of effects. This could be as crude as dropping bombs into the middle of a fleet of obsolete ships, near islands with animals chained at various intervals to test the range of destruction of organic issue, or as elaborate as nuking fake villages in the desert to examine how architecture could deflect and protect against explosive energy. The tricky part, of course, was finding land. The initial Trinity test was conducted in the New Mexico desert near White Sands and Alamogordo, but there were concerns about radiation so close to human settlements. DC had assumed control of the Marshall Islands after evicting the Japanese, and initially that seemed a good candidate for testing — especially since the few hundred people who lived on Bikini Atoll believed DC’s sale pitch that their temporary evacuation of the islands would advance science, progress, and the interests of a lasting peace. They expected to return to the islands after the tests were concluded and the sites cleaned: it would be decades before any Marshallese returned, and they would find that parts of the atolls of sacred memory were simply gone, and that debris was everywhere. In the mid-fifties, the Atomic Energy Commission switched to areas of Nevada that were deemed ‘wasteland’, of no use to anyone. Mackdeon heavily scrutinizes the simplistic approach of the AEC in judging land as useless, and the self-serving way experts were trotted out to assure Nevadans that the tests were harmless. Oh, were there cows giving birth to dead or bizarrely mutated calves? Must be malnutrition. Incidents occurred with nearly every test, as sometimes the wind would shift and radioactive particles would drift into populated areas like Sacramento, or the new devices would have unexpected power. The state often played fast and loose with the tests, at one point ordering soldiers out of a shelter immediately after a detonation to test the soldiers’ ability to perform actions amid the explosion’s aftermath (severe winds and dissipating mushroom cloud).
Despite this, government’s new ally The Science was successful in selling regular explosions as largely innocuous, as pop culture began reflecting an enthusiasm for all things atomic: Las Vegas even hosted a “Miss Atomic Bomb” beauty contest. The creation of better bombs, the continued building of the nuclear arsenal of democracy, was sold as an absolute good. Misinformation wasn’t just a matter of forgetting to communicate inconvenient facts, or thoughtlessly interpreting data in the most positive way possible: when citizens expressed concern about more powerful thermonuclear devices being tested, President Eisenhower suggested keeping the public confused about the distinction between fission (Hiroshima-level bombs) and the far more powerful fusion bombs. Mackdeon argues that the government has continued to keep citizens largely in the dark about the dangers of radioactive byproducts, and ends the book by transitioning to the debate over creating a nuclear waste disposal site in Yucca Mountain.
Although Bombast certainly isn’t for everyone, it’s a fascinating look into the early culture of nuclear testing for the obsessed.
…..wait a tic, it’s not Tuesday. Oh, well. Today’s teaser comes from Bombast: Spinning Atoms in the Desert, about the government’s efforts to convince Nevadans that dropping nukes on a regular basis a half-hour’s drive from their homes was hunky-dory.
“Ernest O. Lawrence was at first assigned the codename Ernest Lawson. When that code name was leaked, security officers assigned him the new name Oscar Wilde, because Wilde had written the play The Importance of Being Earnest.”
“During the second phase of Project Sunshine, cadavers were purchased from pathology labs so the bones might be tested for strontium-90 uptake. The AEC itself, in an internal memo, described the process as body-snatching: ‘Human samples are of great importance and if anyone knows how to do a good job of body snatching, they will really be serving their country.'”
Welcome, friend. Pull up a stool. You’ve come in at the tail end of a story, but it’s one worth hearing again. It’s the history of America, as told from the bar. That doesn’t mean it’s a history of drunkenness in the United States, though that would certainly be worth reading. Instead, Christine Sismondo demonstrates how foundational taverns were to colonial and revolutionary history, and how they’ve continued to sit at the crossroads of American history until the mid-late 20th century. The story peaks with the 1930s, soldiers through until the 1970s, and fade out shortly thereafter. Sismondo combines amusing anecdotes and genuinely interesting history, albeit with some gaps.
In contemporary America, a bar is merely one option among a multitude that you might go on the weekend – -whether your purpose is having a drink with the boys, looking for a date, or watching a game on the now-ubiquitous televisions. In colonial America, though, it was the only place. Taverns weren’t just places for spirits and food: they were meeting halls and courthouses in the early years, and were often the first building erected in a given community. News collected there, and debates were had: this function proved especially important during the years of the Revolution and the war for independence, hosting political debates that sharpened colonial arguments about the tyranny of Parliament, and allowing for direct action and other strikes to be planned. Still later, the taverns were recruiting centers to enlist American men to fight for their liberty against the crown — and the spaces themselves were used to store supplies during the war effort. After the revolution, taverns were also the center of patriotic rebellions against the new tax tyrants, the likes of Hamilton and company, but these (alas) met more effective reaction than Parliament could muster.
After an abrupt jump past the southern war for independence, Sismondo covers the role of taverns in creating political machines, something that would increase their profile as the 19th century wore on – and not in a good way. Ardent spirits were cheap to come by in agricultural America, especially corn whiskey and gin, leading to increasing rates of abuse – and a growing alliance of wives and factory owners wanted to dry out the men of America, preferably at the source. Not only were sober workers more productive (or, at least, less likely to stick their limbs in moving machinery to see if it tickled), but closing down taverns and the like would deny union organizers and other dissident voices a place to gather and plan. Another strong component of the prohibition movement was the widespread unease with America’s surging immigrant population, as well as the mass arrival of blacks from the agricultural south to the industrial north – unease caused both by the usual human fear of those who are different, but also of the influence immigrants had on local politics, ballooning political machines and pushing disruptive ideas like anarchism. The Ku Klux Klan, the most ardent of prohibitionists, were emblematic of many of prohibition’s motives. The book loses steam after this, in part because taverns played an increasingly smaller role in moving American society. They often became instead the platform to demonstrate change that was already happening, as when women began invading men’s space and imposing sit-ins in some pastel imitation of the Civil Rights sit-ins. The bar came less of a place for men to gather, drink, and debate, and more of a casual recreation spot, increasingly populated by strollers and dominated by the racket of televisions. Post 1960s the only interesting politicized bar activity were the Stonewall riots, linked to Stonewall Inn that served as a gay bar, and the resultant push for more toleration and rights for homosexuals.
America Walks into a Bar was great fun, a deft mix of social and more ‘serious’ history — focusing on the connection between them, and hinting at the importance of the built environment for civic and social health. The drift of the tavern from an encompassing community center to a dingy spot on the highway inviting drunk driving, or a loud, hypercommercialized sports bar, is a sad one, but this is nonetheless a fun introduction to the importance of bars to early American history — an a celebration of the places they once were.
Possibly to follow…Madelon Powers’ Faces along the Bar: Lore and Order in the Workingman’s Saloon, 1870-1920. I have it waiting but have been distracted by nuclear wessels.
“Miss Johnson, I pledge to you my confederate here—who is actually a real Confederate—and I will not let this stand. Together with my troop of Chinese acrobats we will end the tyranny of the Largo Trading Company.”
History records that General George A. Custer was killed at the Battle of Little Bighorn, ending an illustrious and often dramatic career. History is wrong, for we discover in Armstrong that the general in fact survived the ambush, being rescued by a white captive-wife of the Sioux, who wanted to thank him for killing her husband The two fled and hid among a traveling theatrical group, and after a series of bloody and zany events, found themselves in an odd town that proved to have dark secrets. The townsfolk had been effectively enslaved by a local trading company with a private army and Sioux allies. Being a knight-errant in the service of Truth, Justice, and the American way, Custer promptly donned a new name – “Armstrong” – and commenced to a lot of derring-do. The result is Armstrong, a comic western novel that draws on western stock characters and tropes while having a little fun at history (and especially Custer’s) expense.
Armstrong’s first mission is to escape the Sioux, but the manner in which he does so (pretending to be a trick shooter in a theatrical group) disrupts his original plan of clearing his name for the massacre at Little Big Horn. He was set up, you see, and he’s particularly suspicious of that drunk in the White House, Grant. After a little bloodbath ensues at Armstrong’s first show, he and the traveling show escape to a little town in a canyon, which seems like a peaceful sanctuary until he realizes there’s something rotten going on. He pledges himself to liberate the town from the government contractors who have imprisoned it, despite being woefully outmanned. His aides in this chivalrous quest include a former Confederate who is a dasher with the ladies; a multilingual Crow scout; a band of dancing girls, and a troop of Chinese acrobats who he trains as skirmishers. The western tropes start with the rebel-with-a-cause and the native ally and only grow from there, but Crocker employs them to have fun with them. The novel is a comic western, its plot warmed by absurdism as much as the Sonoran sun, and features a multitude of running jokes — from Armstrong having to frequently disguise himself, to fun with language. One of the sillier bits includes Armstrong relying on his hunch that all dogs know German using his…er, limited knowledge of Hochdeutsch to enlist a dog as his ally. (“Helpenzie me, bitte!”) It’s reminiscent of Mel Brooks, complete with elements that would no doubt drive some modern readers red with self-righteous rage, like Chinese acrobats whose knowledge of English is limited, or the Union and Confederate officers having a discussion about their respective causes that doesn’t end with the southerner beating his breast in repentance. Although this is intended as fantastical, humorous take on The Western, Crocker nonetheless works in real facts, aided by his having written a Custer biography. I was surprised to learn that Custer served as the groomsman in the wedding of a Confederate friend of his during the war — each man dressed in his uniform.
If you’re in the mood for a ‘light’ western that mixes humor and wild-west adventures, Armstrong is a lot of fun. I think I’ll try more in the series, and explore Crocker’s nonfiction as well.
A few years ago I read Peter Fritzsche’s An Iron Wind: Europe Under Hitler, which examined how the Nazi conquest of most of Europe permeated into its culture in the late thirties and forties. Life and Death in the Third Reich does something similar, but focuses more sharply on the culture of Germany. In particular, Fritzsche explores the creation of the Volksgemeinschaft, “The People’s Community”, and how Hitler and his kameraden transformed the land of poets and thinkers into an abattoir for two thirds of Europe’s Jews. He draws heavily on letters and diaries, to follow how German identity became more politicized and the Aryan myth embraced — to the detriment of Germany’s Jews, who became an Other even to Germans who did not accept Hitler’s hostility towards them. It’s both sobering and insightful.
Arguably the most important aspect of Life and Death is the appeal of the People’s Community. Although this can be defined narrowly as a racial community, the idea of the People’s Community came into being at the outbreak of the Great War, when Germans rallied together regardless of religion or politics to defend Germany against its encircling foes. The volksgemeinschaft was a sustaining vision of German society in which everyone included as ‘the people’ were united, along with their interests; capitalists and labor would not be foes arrayed in opposition against one another, but would exist in solidarity: their identity as a middle-class Berliner or a working-class Frankfurter would be overwhelmed by their status as members of the Volk. It’s easy to understand the appeal of this: virtually everyone wants to Belong to something greater than them; it’s why tribes and nation-states (not to be confused with more ideologically-rooted states like DC and the Soviet Union) exist. Most of us also despair of strife and antagonism; we long for peace, and for the people of Germany this would have been a particularly salient desire, accustomed as they were to goon squads of various political parties fighting in the streets, intimidating not only their rivals but the un-aligned who just wanted a cup of coffee. Hitler’s attempted to create this community both through the ideology of German aryan-ness, envisioning Germans as a distinct and superior Race among Europe and the world’s populations, and through politics and economics: fascism promised to align economic interests with those of the nation and its people, and most of society was ‘coordinated’ along the lines of national socialism — schools, civic groups, unions, etc. The idea of national unity was so popular that even those who disliked Hitler and others in the government supported the system he was creating, and the revolution in thinking and doing that he was imposing. It was suddenly springtime for Germany — Germany was restored from its losses-by-treaty twenty years before, redeemed from the shame of Versailles, recovering from the Weimar financial chaos. Such enthusiasm made it easy to ignore those had suddenly been determined to be un-völkisch, chiefly the Jews — especially after the war started. Fritzsche documents the irregular growth of the Holocaust, as both Hitler’s plans and his timing to effect them were greatly altered by Germany’s successes or losses in the fields. By the time the war turned badly for Germany, virtually all of German Jewry was gone, and the concerns of German citizens had turned to themselves — suddenly the target of Anglo-American bombers. Although there was widespread knowledge of something happening in the east (Germans participated in public auctions of Jewish goods, and the sprawling system of export and death required civilian logistical support), the campaign of ‘othering’ the Jews and the collective hardship of enduring the war (one perpetuated, propaganda said, by those wicked capitalist Jews in the West and the wicked communist Jews in the East) diluted the impact. It reminded me a bit of the revelations of grotesque prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib in the immediate post-9/11 period: most Americans would have ordinarily been scandalized and horrified to learn this was happening in their name, but between the overwhelming memory of 9/11 and the sudden war-footing mentality, virtually no one cared. It was happening to reichsfeinden, so — best let The People in Charge handle it. They know what they’re doing, surely.
Life and Death in the Third Reich is a most interesting book, disturbing in its study of how ordinary men, women, and children could become the willing builders of a revolution and a state so terrible that, 90 years later, they remain the face of evil in the west, despite far more murderous states existing then (Soviet Russia) and afterwards (red China, Mao to the present). Moderns who believe themselves too savvy for this sort of thing, who believe they’d never go along with it, are fooling themselves: we all have hunger that politicians claim they can fill, and we will ignore the poison provided it’s coated with enough sugar. We will happily “other” people: in the past two years people have grown to hate one another for not wearing masks, or for not accepting Pfizer’s jab as their lord and savior –and we will ignore great offenses given sufficient distraction or incentive. Beyond the serious lessons offered by this book, it also offers a glimpse into the everyday live of Germans, sharped as it was by Nazism — creating newfound support for hobbies like genealogy (necessary to prove one’s Aryan credentials) and photography, for documenting the ‘people’s revolution’ as it happened, of being both participants in and documenters of, ‘History in the making’.
Teaser Tuesday is a homeless meme adopted by me in which we share excerpts from our current reads. I stumbled upon a seriously entertaining novel in which George Custer survives the ambush at Little Big Horn and becomes a gun for hire.
I flung open the door on one [theatrical wagon], slammed it behind me, and leapt into the arms of a woman seated just inside. “Well, make yourself at home, why don’t you?” “Excuse me, ma’am, but I’m an innocent man running for his life.” “Well, aren’t you unique? I’ve never met an innocent man.”
Brett Stanciu had a problem. Someone kept breaking into her small library, pilfering money, and smoking cigarettes. She knew who the someone was – Baker, a local drug addict and vagrant who was known to the community as trouble. She even had photographic evidence of him in the library, sitting at her desk, but the police and courts didn’t regard him as enough of a serious threat to address. Even after he was arrested, he was immediately released. Then, one night, confronted by a library trustee, Baker ran out into the night and shot himself. For most of the town, this was fuel for a quick run of gossip, a bit of amusement, and nothing else – -but for Stanciu, it was a tragic end to a frustrating period in her life, and created more questions than relief. Who was Baker? How had a drug habit led to him dying by himself, his blood pooling next to a woodpile? This was the beginning of a journey, taking place over a year, for her search for answers – sitting down with recovering addicts, substance abuse counselors, law enforcement, prosecutors, and devastated parents, delving into the whys and wherefores of substance abuse. Although definitely more of a citizen’s search for answers than a definitive Answer in itself, it’s a moving story that should provide good context for beginning to understand addiction, particularly opioid addiction, for the lay reader.
Although this is a work of nonfiction, it’s not a conventional ‘just the facts, ma’am’ book. Stanciu presents it as a memoir; it’s more a story that follows her over the course of a year, as she attends conferences and meets people who will sit and interview with her. The reader is invited into her life, her memories during this time, with the physical and social background being drawn for us: Stanciu meditate on the changing weather, the landscape around her; she shares the little conversations she had with her daughters, coworkers, and fellow citizens that kept her thinking about this subject stirred. This was not what I was expecting, but I was quickly won over by it, especially after she mentioned drinking maple-cream coffee and I discovered a recipe for it. The account is especially personal because Stanciu reveals to the reader that she’s in recovery herself, albeit from alcohol rather than opioids. As the year progresses, Stanciu shifts to understanding addiction, not just opioid addiction, as a physical disease: although it begins as an act of will and can be resisted, addiction is a physical disordering of the brain: depending on how it progresses in a person (men and women have different experiences with addiction), it can so rewire their brain that they’re not the same person they were before. There are also other contexts, like family background and abuse: it’s harder for poorer people to recover from addiction, for instance, because even one mishap can destroy them financially. One promising path to recovery that Stanciu discovers is Medication-Assisted Therapy, which uses both drugs to wean users off of opioids, while helping them to figure out what put them on the track to substance abuse to begin with, and re-structure their life to get back on track.
Unstitched is a powerful story, often sad but never hopeless. As a librarian who encounters people whose minds and lives have been destroyed by substance abuse every day, this attempt by a fellow librarian to find answers resonated with me enormously.
Shortly after reading On Love, I found another de Botton title in my library’s e-book collection, What they Forgot to Teach You In School. Unsurprisingly, I soon had four pages of quotes from the book. Below are just a few.
On Love
“Our Romantic culture prompts us to imagine love as a kind of boundless admiration for a perfect being. This estimation forgets that there is another way to live, one in which we can love that which is less than ideal, one in which not every mistake has to be appalling, one in which we’re aroused to sorrow and compassion by the sadness and mishaps of others, one in which we can love flaws rather than always fixate on otherworldly perfection. We can, at our best moments, see the child inside the vulnerable adult and extend mercy and kindness as required. Genuine love isn’t blind to defects; it is compassionate towards them and readily sets them within an awareness of a person’s overall qualities and character. Hating ourselves is the easy bit. Learning to give ourselves a break is the true, rare, and properly adult achievement.”
s
Repair, don’t Run
“We cling to rupture because it confirms a story which, though deeply sad at one level, also feels very safe: that big emotional commitments are invariably too risky, that others can’t be trusted, that hope is an illusion — and that we are fundamentally alone.”
“It is no doubt a fine thing to have a relationship without moments of rupture, but it is a finer and more noble achievement still to know how to patch things up repeatedly with those precious strands of emotional gold: self-acceptance, patience, humility, courage, and many careful lessons.”
On Moods
“Moods are proud, imperious things. They show up and insist that they are telling us total certainties about our identities and our prospects — perhaps that our love lives will never work out or that a professional situation is beyond repair. Still, we always have an option of calling their bluff, of realising that they are only a passing state of mind arrogantly pretending to be the whole of us — and that we could, with courage, politely ignore them and change the subject.”
“Ou sense of self is naturally fluid: we are, as a reality and a metaphor, largely made of water. We shouldn’t allow a misplaced idea of permanence to add to our sorrows. Though we may be unable to shift a mood, we can at least recognise it for what it is and understand that, in the inestimatable words of the prophets, with the help of a few hours or days, it too shall pass…”
Be Water, My Friend
No one gets through life with all their careful plan As intact. Something unexpected, shocking and abhorrent regularly comes along, not only to us, but to all human beings. We are simply too exposed to accident, too lacking in information, too frail in our capacities, to avoid some serious avalanches and traps. The second point is to realise that we are, despite moments of confusion, eminently capable of developing very decent plan Bs. […] It helps, in flexing our plan-B muscles, to acquaint ourselves with the lives of many others who had to throw away plan As and begin anew: the person who thought they’d be married forever, then suddenly wasn’t — and coped; the person who was renowned for doing what they did, then had to start over in a dramatically different field — and found a way. Amidst these stories, we’re liable to find a few people who will tell us, very sincerely, that their plan B ended up, eventually, superior to their plan A. They worked harder for it; they had to dig deeper to find it and it carried less vanity and fear within it.”
“It’s worth trying to understand, therefore, why happiness ‘ever after’ should be congenitally so impossible. It isn’t that we can’t ever have a good relationship, a house, or a pension. We may well have all this — and more. It’s simply that these won’t be able to deliver what we hope for from them. We will still worry in the arms of a kind and interesting partner; we will still fret in a well-appointed kitchen; our terrors won’t cease whatever income we have. It sounds implausible — especially when these goods are still far out of our grasp — but we should trust this fundamental truth in order to make an honest peace with the forbidding facts of the human condition. We can never properly be secure, because so long as we are alive, we will be alert to danger and in some way at risk. The only people with full security are the dead; the only people who can be truly at peace are under the ground; cemeteries are the only definitely calm places around.”
At some point in the last year a book tipped me off to Tom Vanderbilt’s Survival City, in which the author tours ruins and remains of DC’s vast Cold War infrastructure while providing a history of the way popular fears and optimism about the Atomic Age manifested themselves in architecture. I was particularly interested in learning more about Nevada’s “Atomic Survival Town“, which grew out of similar experiments in bombing pretend-German and pretend-Japanese towns during World War 2. (Probably the only time Nevada has contained cities built for people instead of automobiles!) The structures that Vanderbilt covers include missile solos, some of which have been converted to other uses or destroyed; an anti-missile site that was meant to be first of a nationwide array, but which was abandoned immediately after opening (as in, the day after); and….a giant wooden tower that was used to mount bombers with working engines so the effects of atomic explosions on moving aircraft could be studied. Some sites are off-limits to Vanderbilt, but he shares information as available. I was particularly interested in (okay, obsessed by) the creation of an underground elementary school in Artesia, New Mexico. The structure is still standing today, but is not open to tourists; the local school board uses it for storage. If you’re really obsessed with the Cold War, this is worth a venture, but there’s as much information in the linked articles above as in the text. After reading this, Command and Control, and Atomic Awakening, I’m surprised that humanity survived the fifties. The amount of casual and enthusiastic irradiation governments engaged in boggles the mind.
Related: Eric Schlosser’s Command and Control, on the growth of nuclear arms and the history of dangerous near-misses with them, providing context for the book’s central history of the Damascus incident; and Phil Patton’s Dreamland: Inside the Secret World of Roswell and Area 51. This is a piece of investigatory tourism that contains largely useful information about various aviation-development-and-testing sites in the Southwest, along with the expected bit of UFO lore and speculation.
In late September, The Skeptics Guide to the Future was released, and I with a preorder read it immediately. The book first examines the ways science fiction of the past got the future wrong, and looks for patterns into the errors. The authors then examine our future’s prospects in the short, medium, and long term. The authors (the brothers Novella) host two podcasts together; a long-running one on science and critical thinking, and another on science fiction reviews. This project nicely converges them, because they’re fairly restrained in the short term, and only engage in wild speculation over the long term while reiterating we have no idea what’s in store. The tempered enthusiasm is consistent throughout the text; the authors are optimistic about the prospects for gene therapy and possibly growing new organs for those whose parts have failed, but caution that there’s much about development we don’t understand. A liver won’t simply grow in a petri dish: its cells are looking for context. Somehow the body’s environment guides organ developments in concert. Although the authors point out that older technologies often stay in place because they work so well, despite the promotion of more technologically sophisticated rivals, their section on transportation ignores the idea that we might return to designing cities that humans are capable of navigating on foot, rather than continuing to try to create technological solutions to the manifest stupidity, the resource-draining and human-life-sucking spectre that is sprawl. One curiosity I noticed was the authors’ assertion that solar and wind are cheaper than coal, which is so absurd on the face of it that I suspect they’re adding the costs of environmental pollution, etc. They did acknowledge the viability of nuclear, though, especially with Gen-IV reactors that not only produce near-zero waste, but can process prior generations’ waste as fuel. There are generous comparisons to SF projections throughout, especially Asimov’s Foundation. Recommended if you’re into futurism, but I enjoyed the Novellas’ Skeptics Guide to the Universemuch better.
When Darwin closed The Origin of Species, he commented on Earth’s “endless forms most beautiful and most wondrous”. However spectacular the life of Earth is from the outside, there’s more wonder to be had by stepping inside the animals’ Umwelt — the world as experienced by them. The animals of Earth experience the world in vastly different ways, their senses tailored for their needs, and it is eye-opening to consider how much more different and fantastic the world might appear to other creatures. We’re dimly aware, of course, that many animals have superior senses to our own sets: hawks can see field mice in close detail at distances where humans couldn’t even resolve the grass said mice were hiding in, and we’ve long made use of dogs’ obvious superior schnozzes. But many animals have senses that function at such a high level that the analogies we draw in attempts to understand them are clumsy at best. Elephants, for instance, communicate quite effectively through subsonic rumbles, and bat’s ultrasonic radiation allows them to nail bugs with precision. Other animals approach ‘our’ senses in very different ways: a spider, for instance, might have two eyes in front for focusing on prey, but a multitude of much smaller eyes that are its primary guide in the world. No two species experience the world exactly the same way, and not just because one can see better, or hear more , or have a different vision of the world because it sees the ultraviolent. Some animals experience time differently: bird brains process birdsong so rapidly they can hear messages in patterns that human ears miss altogether, and whales can interpret elongated conversations (the kind we might have between Earth and a Mars colony, for instance) with the same ease that humans do with our own ‘instant’ back to back chatter. For the whale, ten and twenty minute breaks may seem like the 3 and 4 second breaks in human conversation. For some animals, sensation is distributed: octopus arms have neurons, so they can sense and act on their own accord, though the central brain can coordinate them. An Immense World was an incredibly captivating read, and very much recommended. Definitely a multiple “Wow!” kind of book.
Some highlights:
This goes against every stereotype one might have about crocodiles as brutish, unfeeling animals. With jaws that can crush bone and thick skin that’s heavily armored with bony plates, they seem like the antithesis of delicacy. And yet, they are covered head to tail in sensors that, as Ken Catania and his student Duncan Leitch showed, are 10 times more sensitive to pressure fluctuations than human fingertips.
Mosquitoes, meanwhile, have neurons that seem to respond to both temperatures and chemicals. I ask Leslie Vosshall if this means the insects can taste body heat. She shrugs. “The simplest way to sense the world would be to have the senses be separate—to have neurons that taste, or smell, or see,” she tells me. “Everything would be very tidy. But the more we look, the more we see that a single cell can do multiple things at the same time.” For example, the antennae of ants and other insects are organs of both smell and touch. In an ant’s brain, “these probably fuse to produce a single sensation,” wrote entomologist William Morton Wheeler in 1910. Imagine if we had delicate noses on our fingertips, he suggested. “If we moved about, touching objects to the right and left along our path, our environment would appear to us to be made up of shaped odors, and we should speak of smells that are spherical, triangular, pointed, etc. Our mental processes would be largely determined by a world of chemical configurations, as they are now by a world of visual (i.e., color) shapes.”
Reading Freely 