Biosmut (and The Snark Ascending)

N.B. I’ve begun cross-posting these (alongside other brand-spankin’-new, never-before-skimmed musings) over at my own web site, The Snark Ascending, where I can soliloquize with abandon on topics, such as flagrant indifference to the environment, which I would never even allude to here.

BIOSMUT

Like most Americans, I am deeply concerned by the issues impacting our country*, such as the pollution issue, the foreign policy issue, the cellulite issue, the April/May Cosmo, etc. But I think I may aver without fear of accuracy that foremost among these is: the smut issue.

I recently found myself face-to-face with this very issue while reading my biology textbook. It is for your edification as well as my own that I reprint the following verbatim excerpt, which concerns the sporophyte of the liverwort Marchantia, and should for enhanced effect be read as though the text consists of the words “what are you wearing?” Better yet, experts recommend first spending an afternoon immersed in a work such as Loins of the Mississippi by Jessamyn Torso**, so as to get yourself in the proper frame of mind. Then, feast your endoplasmic reticula on THIS baby:

“The mature capsule contains spores and elaters, which are elongate structures with spirally thickened walls. Eventually the wall of the capsule dries and bursts, releasing the spores. Ejection of the spores is aided by the elaters, which twist and jerk as they dry, thus throwing the spores from the capsule.”

The passage goes on to describe, in painstaking detail, the capsule’s subsequent cigarette. Now I’m not saying science is finally good for something, but, well…I’d be a fool not to open my mind.

At the same time, I must admit to some conflicted feelings over this. My main problem is reconciling myself to this new perception of my bio book. I’m just not sure I can do this. For one thing, the book is old.*** It dates from my father’s own biological studies at the University of Pennsylvania (motto: “Not The State School! The Other One!”). Reading it in its entirety has been one of my summer projects, which also include Russian and popsicles. I have become fond of this book, against my better judgment and despite its repeated attempts to make me feel as though I fall, on the Great Intellectual Barometer of Intellectualness****, somewhere between “microbe” and “leader of the free world”*****. Take this scintillating nugget (topic: “The Effects of Qualitatively Unequal Cleavages”) (really):

“We have already seen that the cytoplasm of the unfertilized egg is often not homogeneous. Most animal eggs contain stored food material, or yolk, which being usually concentrated in one part of the cell, establishes a distinction between animal and vegetal hemispheres. Another distinction between them is that the animal hemisphere often has much more pigment in the cytoplasm than the vegetal hemisphere. It is reasonable to think that other materials may be similarly restricted to certain regions of the cytoplasm.”

OH! So I CAN think that other materials may be similarly restricted to certain regions of the cytoplasm! I feel MUCH better now! Don’t you?

But my point is, I have heretofore viewed this book solely as a source of infinite tedious enlightenment. For example, if not for Chapter 21 (”In Which Pooh Goes Visiting and Gets Into A Tight Place”), I might never have become acquainted with the myriad classes of algae, which include Chrysophyta, Rhodophyta, Phaeophyta, Toyota, Rhododendron, Morticia, Mexican Hairless, and Neil. Sociology enters the picture, too, with the introduction of Lycopsida, the highly exclusive and icy-hearted “club mosses,” whose ranks consist primarily of Connecticut orthodontists who, it is widely rumored, would never let poor Rudolph join in any reindeer games.

This is not to say I trust the book implicitly. Far from it. In fact, I have had occasion to be convinced of its pulling a fast one on me. Hardcore followers of my dad’s biology book will know I am referring to page 464, paragraph 2, line 6, aisle 8, adjacent the bendy straws, wherein the author has the gall to assert that our bodies feature such structures as “meiotic spindles,” which, as of now, I have not located ANYWHERE on my personal body. Fortunately for those readers less prone than I to independent thought, this chicanery is blatantly exposed on neighboring page 465. Here we are shown a picture of Canada geese, which – and I’m sure many eminent biologists will back me up on this – have nothing to do with meiotic spindles whatsoever.

Come to think of it, this makes me feel much more sanguine vis-à-vis Smutgate, as if maybe the whole thing is just a harmless trick to see if we’re still paying attention. I can’t speak for anyone else, but I know many’s the time I’ve found my thoughts diverging from the text before me, informative though it may be, little knowing the author has inserted a passage teeming with such filth as to boggle the “Oh, Trent,” moaned Jessamyn, her qualitatively unequal cleavage pulsating with wild bilateral symmetry. “Do it do it DO IT.” “Okay,” said Trent, his massively bulging biomass bulging massively as he Back with me now? Thank you.

*America, or as some lah-dee-dah astronomy types will insist on calling it, “Earth”.
**Available wherever loins are sold.
***As evidenced by this actual excerpt from the inside cover page: “©The Pleistocene Epoch”.
****Sponsor: Claire’s Accessories.
*****Notice I have deftly arranged this sentence so that you may interpret it any way you wish. You’re welcome.

©2007, Nicola M.

From Oregon to North Carolina

We started off in the Willamette Valley and worked our way down to Glide, Oregon, the small rural town where I grew up. Rivers run through the valley and make their way through the North Umpqua national forest before empying in the Pacific. I absorbed the smells, sounds, and family that I would not see for a while. We continued south, headed to Trinidad, California. The temperature dropped to about 70F and the redwoods shot upwards, disappearing in the lingering fog. Our trip finally turned east, as we traveled over the Smith river national forest. Temperatures began to rise. We headed into Nevada, got my last fix of In n Out Burger, and drove on the loneliest highway to Ely, Nevada. A small, forgotten miners town. After Ely, we headed over the rugged landscape to Moab, Utah. We saw the arches and the red dirt. My short attention span soon became bored of it, despite the magnificence of it all. Found a good microbrewery, a great motel 6– we were traveling with a cat and dog–and left for Denver the next day. The Colorado rockies were not as magnicent as the Canadian rockies and clustered with ski resorts and mini malls. Stayed the night in Denver and ate at a Mexican restaurant with nearly every sort of animal hanging on the wall- horses, cows, deer. After Denver, the trip became a blur. Kansas City, Missouri, Evansville, Indianna, Knoxville, Tennessee, Raleigh. We drove nearly an hour out of our way to see monument rock in Kansas, probably becuase we were so desperate for anything but flat plains…A swarm of motorcyclists forced us into another hotel in Kansas City. Evansville, Indianna was a cute riverfront town, but surprised to see a casino as the main attraction. The temperatures just kept rising and rising. In Knoxville, I scarfed down some KFC for the first time in about 10 years. Next step was teh great smoky mountains. I thought, “Finally, a little something to remind my self of the northwest!” Boy was I wrong, Dollywood and arcade land and laser tag and water parks everywhere. It took forever to even get into the park. The mountain air was nice once we got to about 6,000 ft, but I was dissappointed to see the haze that impeded our view. I was really anxiouse to get to NC. We arrived in Raleigh the 5th, but couldn’t move into our house until the 6th. We stayed at yet another motel 6-and hopefully the last one ever- and got here just in time for the gigantic heat wave…

Autumn B

Sound research

My last post was perhaps something of a rant, so this one will be more positive. One need only the barest acquaintance with me to know my enthusiasm for radio. I’ve recently heard two excellent radio pieces on topics that touch on my research and (to coin a phrase) my research-in-law.

First is Alix Spiegel’s amazing, haunting, and horrifying piece on All Things Considered Wednesday night about mental health in a a post-Katrina trailer park.  There’s nothing in it that should be rationally surprising–especially not if you’ve read Kai Erikson’s classic Everything in its Path, which shows how moving people into trailer parks without their pre-disaster social networks is has disastrous consequences for mental health.  Disasters like Katrina are terrible for lots of reasons, but prime among them is the way it disrupts peoples lives–often permanently–and destroys their everyday patterns of support and solidarity.  But the point is not that Erickson said this in 1978 (no one listens to sociologists of disaster, anyway)–it’s how well Alix Spiegel tells the story here.  This shouldn’t be a surprise either, if you’ve heard her work on This American Life or All Things Considered.  But this piece is the sort that will make you stop whatever you’re doing and just listen, carefully.

On a related note, I found this article in the Times today about criticisms of the Red Cross from Katrina survivors remarkable.  Change the dollar amounts (by several orders of magnitude) and the location, and the article could be describing the Halifax Relief Commission.

The second piece of radio I want to highlight is a two-part documentary from the CBC program Ideas about the Gates Foundation and its drive for vaccinations in Africa.  While it doesn’t raise the questions that Mari’s research does, it touches on lots of questions that are often not addressed in the generally laudatory coverage that it gets in most media.  Are vaccinations necessarily the best way to spend money to improve health in poor countries, or would it be better to emphasize clean water and nutrition?  What happens when rich whites come in and tell poorer, darker-skinned people what to do to improve their countries?  What about the brain-drain of doctors and nurses from the global south to the global north?  If you’ve got two hours to spare, I really recommend downloading and listening to this.  (Download it soon, because part one will disappear in a week, I think.)  Part one is here.  Part two is here.

-jacob

The new eugenics

For the last day or so, among the most emailed articles on the New York Times website was a feature in Science Times about a new book by Gregory Clarke called A Farewell to Alms. It’s a terrifying article, not because reports on something scary (we get stories like that all the time nowadays) but because the article itself espouses what I see as a new eugenics. I should say that I haven’t read Clarke’s book, only Nicholas Wade’s article. I thus don’t know whether the article’s egregiousness comes from Clarke or Wade. But either the Times has given a major article to a book that’s full of nonsense, or its reporter so misinterpreted the book as to reduce it to nonsense. I’m not sure which is worse.

Clarke wanted to answer a trendy question: Why did industrialization happen when and where it did? To answer it, he examined early modern English probate records in order to figure out who the industrializers were. He found that, counterintuitively, the rich people had more surviving children than did poor people, thus the population of industrial(-izing) England was largely made up of the descendants of the elite, not (as one might think) of the poor. I have some methodological questions about this argument. I’m not certain, but it seems unlikely that people who die without an estate would have probate records. And of course the poor were likely to die without any estate. So from the start, the entire study seems flawed to me. That said, it seems likely that in his book, Clarke addresses this concern, or at least explains better his methodology and discusses who in England got a paper record of their estate and family, and who didn’t. I wouldn’t necessarily expect this level of detail in a newspaper article, so I’ll give Wade and Clarke a pass on this one.

“From Russia with Love” (or, “Aleks debunks 007”)

So contrary to James Bond movies and other popular portrayals of Russia these days, people don’t drive tanks around downtown St Petersburg, they don’t drink vodka 24-7, and they don’t talk to each other in English with a weird accent.

 

In fact, St Petersburg’s Pulkovo International Airport, with its socialist realist (“socialist baroque”) façade, and the occasional Soviet insignia in various metro stations are the only remaining clues of Russia’s communist past.

 

An unbiased spectator will immediately observe, probably to his surprise, that modern St Petersburg is booming. It suffices to ascend the escalator from the metro to Nevsky Prospekt, the city’s main street, and to circumspect, observing thousands (maybe millions) of people swarming up and down the sidewalks and in and out of stores at any time of day or night. Since, around the time of the summer solstice, the sun sets in St Petersburg at about 1 AM only to rise again about 3 AM, it takes a bit of adjusting to get used to the fact that one is part of these swarming masses in the middle of daylight at midnight.

 

St Petersburg’s economic boom is not limited to Nevsky. In any corner of the city, new buildings are popping up like mushrooms out of the wet Russian soil. (Of course, this is yet to impact the terrible housing situation, with 1-bedroom apartments in the outskirts of the city costing more than our house in suburban Denver, Colorado.) New American-style stores are closely following in the steps of the residential development. “Okey”—the Russian analogue to Wal-Mart—sells everything from apples to underwear to computer parts and in between at affordable (at least for an American on USP money) prices. And yes, everything is “Made in China”.

 

On top of that, it is also comforting to see that the Russian government is taking matters seriously. The Russian National Project “Education”, run by Dmitry Medvedev, Deputy-Prime Minister and President Putin’s second right-hand man, has been pumping millions into Russia’s crumbled education infrastructure. The Graduate School of Management at St Petersburg State, where I worked, received $5 million (US) from the government in what one associate described as “a catastrophe of national proportions” because the school had a hard time dealing with all the funding. While I was there, they acquired new, state-of-the-art computers; imported books from the United States; and hired lecturers from Europe.

 

During my stay, three events of national importance took place, shedding more light on Russia’s dynamic image. The first, described by The Wall Street Journal as President Putin’s attempt to place a “fifth column” of “KGB operatives” in the United States, was the reconciliation of the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad and the Moscow Patriarchate, two parts of the Russian Orthodox Church divided by the 1917 Revolution and subsequent civil war. It took place in Moscow’s newly constructed Christ the Saviour Cathedral amid thousands of Orthodox faithful from around the world. The fact this event was not only broadcast live on Vesti 24, the Russian analogue to CNN, but also occupied all the news headlines of that week, and that even those distant from the Orthodox Church could be observed discussing its significance, shows its importance for modern Russia. It was not just the end of a tragic chapter in Church history; it was the reconciliation of the Russian nation, divided into “reds” and “whites” by the turmoil of the civil war. It also marked a new chapter in Russian Church-State relations, with President Putin speaking at the ceremony of the importance of the Church to Russian society.

 

The second event was the passing of former President Boris Yeltsin. It could be seen that in burying Yeltsin, Russians were burying the remnants of their past. The former president, hugely unpopular at home but immensely loved abroad, is bound to leave a mixed legacy. Ironically, the current president is immensely loved at home, but hugely unpopular abroad.

 

The third event was the international Economic Forum held in St Petersburg. It brought together not only important statesmen but also businessmen, Russian and foreign, investing in Russia. The figures of total foreign investment in Russia announced at that forum reveal that, despite the looming Cold War between Russia and the United States and the Litvinenko scandal with Britain, most American and British businessmen see Russia as an excellent opportunity.

 

This is not of course to say that modern Russian does not have its problems. The roads are in terrible condition and smoking is out of control. It takes four and a half hours to traverse Russia’s main national highway from St Petersburg to the ancient town of Novgorod, a distance of 90 miles. And while our studies revealed that 48% of Russian adults smoke, I am convinced that figure is closer to 90%. Running hot water in many apartments is still a luxury and attempting to drive around the city is a form of suicide for all the potholes, bad drivers, congestion, tramway lines, and antagonistic traffic police.

 

Yet despite its many problems, modern Russia poses a serious challenge to Western democracy. President Putin stated that Russia intended to pursue its own path of reform, not to blindly import ideas from overseas. So far, he is making substantial progress; time will tell if the positive changes in St Petersburg will spread to remote villages, where the situation is far more dire. And time, too, will tell if Russia and America are once again headed for a showdown, as de Tocqueville predicted centuries ago.

 Aleksandr Andreev

New York City, #2

Duke in New York and Random House. There’s so much to explain and talk about! I’m really looking forward to doing some kind of coffee/seminar about the book publishing world when I get back to Duke, because I’ve learned so much this summer and I’d like to share the knowledge. Hopefully you guys will find it fun to learn about, too.

Well, I’ll start by telling you about Duke in New York. It’s a “study away” program, meaning that it works just like study abroad except we’re here in the U.S.. Professor Torgovnick, our program director, and Katie, our RA, helped us get used to the city and find our way around for a week before class actually started. After a week in NYC, our class (English 181BS, “The Arts in New York”) began. We met for 4 hours every Monday (sounds like a lot, but it really wasn’t) and 2 hours on Saturday to learn about NYC neighborhoods, cultural events, and literary/theatrical representations of New York. On weekday nights we went to plays and other performances. The class ended at the end of June. It was GREAT! You’ll hear more about it if I get to do a seminar/coffee.

In June I started my FANTASTIC internship at Random House. And although the internship was amazing, the first week in June was really tough because I had to learn to juggle a Duke class plus a full-time internship. The problem was that I wasn’t getting enough sleep. At school, I’m big on naps. If I have to get up early, I nap later. I’m usually a night owl. But if you’re working full-time, you can’t take naps during the day, so you have to learn to go to bed early. Let me tell you, I learned after the first week! It was brutal. It’s cool now though. I’m going to bed at like 9 or 10 these days.

But anyway, back to the internship – so great. I’m working mostly in editorial, so I go through submitted manuscripts, write editorial suggestions and evaluations, discuss manuscripts with my supervisors, and write rejection letters when necessary. I’ve been working on publicity projects for the blog and logging in photographs for a forthcoming book. I got the chance to handle the personal family photographs of a VERY famous person…and meet another VERY famous person…I’ll tell you more later!

The internship is really intense. We have hour-long luncheon seminars every Wednesday where we hear from representatives in different sectors of the company about careers in their departments. In addition to the daily responsibilities of our internship, we have an Intern Project that all 60 interns have to work on and complete.

But guess what? Every minute has been so much fun!

Ikee G.

New York City, #1

This is my last week in NYC! I wish I had posted on this blog earlier. Now I have to go back in my memory and recall all the AMAZING things that happened over the summer! When I got here in May I probably looked quite naïve. I didn’t know how to navigate the subway or how to find my way around New York neighborhoods. Now I pretty much know my way around Manhattan. Armed with my trusty map, I can find my way no matter where I am!

The key, however, is not to pull out your map, lest you look like a tourist. Tourists are abhorred in Manhattan and I’m starting to understand why. It’s nearly impossible to walk through the Times Square area without seeing huge groups of people standing around snapping photos. I mean, it’s to be expected – it is Times Square, after all – but sometimes you have to walk through Times Square to get where you need to go.

The things that usually impress people about NYC didn’t really impress me that much. We (myself and some other Duke in New Yorkers) went to Times Square our first night here, and I didn’t even know that it was Times Square! I was looking around like “where is it?” It just looked like downtown Chicago to me. What I think is cool about New York is that there are so many neighborhoods in so little space, that you can run into anybody anywhere, and that there are so many hidden treasures around every corner.

Example #1 of how you can run into anybody anywhere: three of us went to a (free!) comedy club called the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre. It stars Amy Poehler from Saturday Night Live, and the performance was great. I ran into a friend of a friend, a Duke alum, just standing in line waiting to get in. There are Dukies all over the world!

Example #2 of how you can run into anybody anywhere: On the first day (yup, the first day!) of my internship, I got the chance to go to a book release party where Steve Harvey, the famous comedian, was in attendance. I was really excited!

Examples of hidden treasures in NYC: AURA THAI. MANDOO BAR (not a real bar, it’s a Korean dumpling house). MEE. PINKBERRY. Please check out these restaurants if you ever come to NYC. They’re wonderful.

I’ve been able to do so many cool things this summer! Pizza in Brooklyn. Walking the Brooklyn Bridge (both ways, to Brooklyn and back!) Performing poetry at a street fair in Harlem (best memory of the summer). Going to a jazz club. Hanging out in Central Park. Going to tons of museums (the Met, the MoMA, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, and the Museum of Natural History). And I haven’t even started to tell you about my internship and Duke in New York itself! Stay tuned.

Ikee G.

Piranha in Excelsis

As a future Duke University student, I was getting pretty excited about attending my future school (Duke University). But that was before I became acquainted with the institution’s Cardinal Rule of Studentship: no illegal fish. This is true. It’s in the Residence Hall Policies, stated as follows: “Fish are allowed provided … no illegal species are kept.”

I don’t know about you, but there is only so long The Man can keep me down.

I should explain here that I have this weensy problem with rules. It’s not that I don’t like them, per se: rules are often necessary, and great in a besciamelle. It’s more that I don’t like rules made by people who are not, technically, me. I tend to feel very deeply that they suck. They suck so emphatically, in fact, that every fiber of my being* rallies to rebel against their emphatic suckfulness. Hence the fact that, all of a sudden, what I want more than anything in the world — more than global harmony, more than spicy food, more than monkey love — is illegal fish.

The thing is, I hate fish. Fish are slimy scummy crummy mucoid crud beings, the boogers of the sea, as has been proven time and time again on the following grounds:

1. Their food smells like radioactive personal regions.
2. See No. 1.
3. They regularly develop “dropsy,” a condition wherein they swell to the size of Mazda Miatas, then explode, spewing Ambiguous Fish Parts throughout your domicile (”What’s this in the sugar bowl, Sue?” “It’s sugar.” “It doesn’t look like sugar.” “It’s SUGAR.”)

Finally — and this is the pièce de résistance, or, roughly translated from the German, “wasted aquarium money” –

4. They die for fun.

I speak from experience. From the time I was seven to the time I was eleven, I kept fish for 13,000 years. My inaugural fish experience came in the form of Dawn, a goldfish from the Wrong Side of the Tracks, in that she was a genuine carnival goldfish won from a genuine carnival carny. Of couse she didn’t go around broadcasting her humble origins, but you could tell by the subtle things, such as her tattoos, alcoholism, poor dental hygiene, pickup truck, etc. She died in six days, thereby setting me on a lifelong trajectory of bitterness, hate, and flossing. Tragically, she died carrying the carny’s child.

But back to The Man, or as he is sometimes known, “Duke University.”** Oh sure, it tries to manipulate us with world-class educations. But I ask you, is this a fair trade for No Illegal Fish? Exactly how many entering freshmen (motto: “We have Shower Caddies!”) in the history of entering freshmen do you suppose have been blinded to this monstrous oppression via a device as transparent as a glitzy “welcome week” filled with scholastic opportunities, free dinners, visits from such luminaries as Robert Frost, Little Richard, Little Debbie, Attila the Hun, Flipper, etc.? ZERO, THAT’S how many, although I forget what the question was.

My point is, such gauntlets as The Man has here thrown down are never insurmountable. With this in mind, I’ve taken it upon myself to devise a plan. It is a plan of infinite intricacy and complexity, the formulation of which took countless seconds and involved untold blood, sweat and tears. I do not wish to blazon my own accomplishments, but during that turbulent time, I personally consumed one (1) tube of Go-Gurt brand yogurt***, preferred sustenance of intrepid pioneers everywhere. This is the kind of bullet I am willing to take for you as well as for my country. The plan goes as follows:

Step 1. Familiarize yourself with all nuances of “no illegal fish” mandate, especially the nuance whereby you are not allowed to keep illegal fish.

Step 2. Keep illegal fish anyway.

“Are you out of your mind?!” you are perhaps saying, eyebrows taut with indignation. “I would never jeopardize four years of an unexcelled undergraduate education, not to mention graduate school and the limitless opportunities which would otherwise arise afterwards!” To which I say: whiner. The time for social reformation has come, and it is now, or 2:30, when the movie I am watching finishes.

Yet in the end (and I know you were worried), I will not attempt to combat this shameful injustice. I will grin, in the name of higher education****, and bear it. Because there is in fact one faint glimmer of hope for us, the martyred, the subjugated.

There is nothing in the Residence Hall Policies, anywhere, that prohibits any one of us from keeping a carny.

*Except a few, who are playing Tetris.
**He also goes by “Chad”.
***The Yogurt You Eat With Your Hands — Not A Spoon!
****Also “Chad”.

©2007, Nicola M.

Liberal arts service academies

I’m rather surprised to find myself recommending an article in the Weekly Standard, but much of what John Noonan writes here is quite sensible. (Via Robert Farley at TAPPED.) The curriculum of the service academies is called the Thayer System, and it was developed after the War of 1812. It emphasizes math and engineering and, while you can get social sciences and humanities degrees, they’re de-emphasized. Noonan argues, rightly I think, that officers today need to understand people as much more than they understand artillery trajectories and engines. In previous wars, the government has recruited academics and intellectuals to do this kind of work (see Robin Wink’s Cloak and Gown for some fine examples), and perhaps as George Packer argues, we’re moving back towards that. But surely it makes sense to have that sort of knowledge and analytical ability in-house.

It seems to me that Noonan’s arguments can be made more broadly than just training military officers. It’s been well documented (although I’m too lazy to go and find a link) that the liberal arts are on the decline in American college and universities, as more and more undergraduates major in explicitly pre-professional degrees. Yet it’s hard to imagine a profession in which the analytical and practical skills taught in liberal arts educations aren’t going to be worth more in the long term than whatever they teach in undergrad business majors.

(It perhaps goes without saying that I find some of what Noonan writes–in particular, his paean to the British Empire–to be utter nonsense. But I don’t think it detracts from his larger curricular points.)

-jacob