Unidentified Flying Threats
By NICK POPE
ON the afternoon of Nov. 7, 2006, pilots and airport employees at O’Hare International Airport in Chicago saw a disc-like object hovering over the tarmac for several minutes. Because nothing was tracked on radar, the Federal Aviation Administration did not investigate. Yet radar is not a reliable detector of all aircraft. Stealth planes are designed to be invisible to radar, and many radar systems filter out signals not matching the normal characteristics of aircraft. Did it really make sense to entirely ignore the observations of several witnesses?
A healthy skepticism about extraterrestrial space travelers leads people to disregard U.F.O. sightings without a moment’s thought. But in the United States, this translates into overdependence on radar data and indifference to all kinds of unidentified aircraft — a weakness that could be exploited by terrorists or anyone seeking to engage in espionage against the United States.
The American government has not investigated U.F.O. sightings since 1969, when the Air Force ended Project Blue Book, an effort to scientifically analyze all sightings to see if any posed a threat to national security. Britain and France, in contrast, continue to investigate U.F.O. sightings, because of concerns that some sightings might be attributable to foreign military aircraft breaching their airspace, or to foreign space-based systems of interest to the intelligence community.
Most of the incidents investigated in Britain have been easily explained as misidentifications of stars and planets, aircraft lights, satellites and meteors, but some cases have raised national security or air safety issues.
On Dec. 26, 1980, for instance, several witnesses at two American Air Force bases in England reported seeing a U.F.O. land. An examination of the site turned up indentations in the ground and a level of radiation in the area that was significantly higher than ordinary. More witnesses at the same base reported the U.F.O. again on subsequent nights. The deputy base commander reported that the aircraft aimed light beams into the most highly sensitive area of the base — a clear security breach.
On March 30 and 31, 1993, there was a wave of U.F.O. sightings over Britain. One witness described a triangular-shaped craft that flew slowly over an air force base before accelerating away to the horizon in an instant, many times faster than a jet. The British military reported, “There would seem to be some evidence on this occasion that an unidentified object (or objects) of unknown origin was operating over the U.K.”
On April 23, 2007, a commercial airline pilot and some of his passengers reported a huge cigar-shaped U.F.O. — the pilot estimated it to be a mile wide — near the Channel Islands. At the time, air traffic controllers reported to the pilot that radar picked up something, but that it was “unknown traffic.”
In addition, there have been several incidents of near misses between U.F.O.s and known aircraft — enough to prompt the Ministry of Defense and the British Civil Aviation Authority to advise pilots, if they encounter anything, “not to maneuver, other than to place the object astern, if possible.”
The United States is no less vulnerable than Britain and France to threats to security and air safety. The United States Air Force or the National Aeronautics and Space Administration should reopen investigations of U.F.O. phenomena. It would not imply that the country has suddenly started believing in little green men. It would simply recognize the possibility that radar alone cannot always tell us what’s out there.
Showing posts with label op-ed. Show all posts
Showing posts with label op-ed. Show all posts
Tuesday, July 29, 2008
Friday, July 11, 2008
Op-Ed: Slavery
A sensitive topic that requires a light touch.
The Justice Department, Blind to Slavery
By JOHN R. MILLER
PRESIDENT BUSH has won support abroad and bipartisan praise at home for his efforts to combat human trafficking, the slavery of our time. But now that work is imperiled by his own Department of Justice.
At the United Nations in 2003, Mr. Bush denounced the sex trafficking of women and girls around the world. A little more than two years later, he signed into law a bill that included a broad array of measures to reduce the domestic demand for sex trafficking.
Sex slavery is not the only modern incarnation of this ancient institution — factory slavery, farm slavery and domestic servitude are still with us — but it is the largest category of slavery in the United States. People who have spoken with the president say that he wants the fight to end modern slavery to be one of his legacies as president.
From 2002 to 2006, I led the State Department’s efforts to monitor and combat human trafficking. I felt my job was to nurture a 21st-century abolitionist movement with the United States at the lead. At times, my work was disparaged by some embassies and regional bureaus that didn’t want their host countries to be criticized. I didn’t win every battle, but the White House always made it clear that the president supported my work and thought it was important.
Imagine my surprise, then, when the Justice Department started a campaign against a new bill that would strengthen the government’s anti-human trafficking efforts. In a 13-page letter last year, the department blasted almost every provision in the new bill that would reasonably expand American anti-slavery efforts.
Should the State Department’s annual report on trafficking, which grades governments on how well they are combating modern slavery, consider whether governments put traffickers in jail? The Justice Department says no. Should the Homeland Security and Health and Human Services Departments streamline their efforts to help foreign trafficking victims get visas and care? No. Should the Homeland Security, Health and Human Services, State and Justice Departments pool their data on human trafficking to help devise strategies to prevent it? Amazingly, no.
In its letter, the Justice Department even opposes authorizing the president to create new awards for the international groups that are leading the struggle for abolition. It also doesn’t want the State Department to be required to give the names of American anti-trafficking phone lines to visa applicants at American consulates overseas. It doesn’t want a citizen task force to help develop an information pamphlet for victims.
Some objections like these are, regrettably, to be expected in a Washington turf battle. But the Justice Department is consistent — it opposes changes to expand its own efforts to combat human trafficking, too.
Should the department prosecute the American sex tourists who create demand for adult human-trafficking victims in foreign countries? No. Should Congress make clear that there should be increased penalties for Americans who sexually abuse children abroad? No way. Should we give our courts jurisdiction over Americans who traffic human beings abroad? Certainly not. Should the attorney general include information in his annual report on his department’s efforts to enforce anti-trafficking laws against federal contractors and employees? No. Too “burdensome,” says the Justice Department.
The department strongly objects to a provision that would make it easier to prosecute pimps, the chief slaveholders in the United States. The Justice Department opposes taking away from pimps the defense that they did not know a child’s age. And it opposes easing the requirement to prove force, fraud or coercion in order to prosecute a pimp for human trafficking.
How did President Bush’s Justice Department come to these positions? In conversations, department employees emphasize the threats of diversion of federal resources and intrusion on state and local rights.
But it is hard to believe these are the reasons. After all, the Justice Department knows that it will prosecute only the biggest pimps just as it goes after only the biggest drug dealers. It knows that pimping has long been recognized as an interstate activity with a federal role. And the Justice Department knows that the states have had very limited success when trying to convict traffickers.
A culture clash, I suspect, is the real reason for the Justice Department’s opposition. This isn’t the usual culture clash of right and left, religious and secular. In this case, the feminist, religious and secular groups that help sex-trafficking survivors are on one side. And on the other are the department’s lawyers (most of them male), the Erotic Service Providers Union and the American Civil Liberties Union — this side believes that vast numbers of women engage in prostitution as a “profession,” by choice.
As one Justice Department lawyer put it at a meeting I attended, there is “hard pimping and soft pimping.” The department’s letter hints at this view. Adult prostitutes who are transported across state lines, in violation of the Mann Act, should not receive grants under the Victims of Crime Act of 1984 because they “do not meet the legal definition of ‘victim,’” the letter states.
Both sides agree there is a small group of expensive call girls — the kind paraded in recent political scandals — who may choose to engage in prostitution. But that’s where agreement ends. Those who work with trafficking victims and those who have interviewed survivors believe that most prostitutes are poor, young, abused, harassed, raped, beaten and under the control of pimps against their will.
Put me on the side of those who have worked with the victims. I have talked with survivors all over the world, including the United States, and I share the view that these women and girls — the average age of entry into prostitution is 14 — are not participating in the “oldest profession” but in the oldest form of abuse. They are slaves.
It is hard to believe that the Justice Department’s perspective reflects the man at the top of the Bush administration. Yet the unusual anti-slavery coalition that President Bush helped to forge now finds itself battling the president’s own Justice Department.
The department lost the battle in the House, which passed the new anti-human trafficking bill almost unanimously, by a vote of 405 to 2. Unfortunately, the department seems to have more influence with the Senate, where the bill is stalled in the Judiciary Committee. And Senator Joseph R. Biden, Democrat of Delaware, has introduced a bill that largely complies with the department’s views.
The president may never have seen the Justice Department’s letter. But Representatives Carolyn Maloney, Democrat of New York, and Deborah Pryce, Republican of Ohio, two of the leaders of the Congressional Caucus on Human Trafficking, have been unable to arrange a meeting with the president to express their concerns to him.
President Bush should meet with them — and his own Justice Department — before he loses his legacy and his leadership on the abolition of modern slavery.
The Justice Department, Blind to Slavery
By JOHN R. MILLER
PRESIDENT BUSH has won support abroad and bipartisan praise at home for his efforts to combat human trafficking, the slavery of our time. But now that work is imperiled by his own Department of Justice.
At the United Nations in 2003, Mr. Bush denounced the sex trafficking of women and girls around the world. A little more than two years later, he signed into law a bill that included a broad array of measures to reduce the domestic demand for sex trafficking.
Sex slavery is not the only modern incarnation of this ancient institution — factory slavery, farm slavery and domestic servitude are still with us — but it is the largest category of slavery in the United States. People who have spoken with the president say that he wants the fight to end modern slavery to be one of his legacies as president.
From 2002 to 2006, I led the State Department’s efforts to monitor and combat human trafficking. I felt my job was to nurture a 21st-century abolitionist movement with the United States at the lead. At times, my work was disparaged by some embassies and regional bureaus that didn’t want their host countries to be criticized. I didn’t win every battle, but the White House always made it clear that the president supported my work and thought it was important.
Imagine my surprise, then, when the Justice Department started a campaign against a new bill that would strengthen the government’s anti-human trafficking efforts. In a 13-page letter last year, the department blasted almost every provision in the new bill that would reasonably expand American anti-slavery efforts.
Should the State Department’s annual report on trafficking, which grades governments on how well they are combating modern slavery, consider whether governments put traffickers in jail? The Justice Department says no. Should the Homeland Security and Health and Human Services Departments streamline their efforts to help foreign trafficking victims get visas and care? No. Should the Homeland Security, Health and Human Services, State and Justice Departments pool their data on human trafficking to help devise strategies to prevent it? Amazingly, no.
In its letter, the Justice Department even opposes authorizing the president to create new awards for the international groups that are leading the struggle for abolition. It also doesn’t want the State Department to be required to give the names of American anti-trafficking phone lines to visa applicants at American consulates overseas. It doesn’t want a citizen task force to help develop an information pamphlet for victims.
Some objections like these are, regrettably, to be expected in a Washington turf battle. But the Justice Department is consistent — it opposes changes to expand its own efforts to combat human trafficking, too.
Should the department prosecute the American sex tourists who create demand for adult human-trafficking victims in foreign countries? No. Should Congress make clear that there should be increased penalties for Americans who sexually abuse children abroad? No way. Should we give our courts jurisdiction over Americans who traffic human beings abroad? Certainly not. Should the attorney general include information in his annual report on his department’s efforts to enforce anti-trafficking laws against federal contractors and employees? No. Too “burdensome,” says the Justice Department.
The department strongly objects to a provision that would make it easier to prosecute pimps, the chief slaveholders in the United States. The Justice Department opposes taking away from pimps the defense that they did not know a child’s age. And it opposes easing the requirement to prove force, fraud or coercion in order to prosecute a pimp for human trafficking.
How did President Bush’s Justice Department come to these positions? In conversations, department employees emphasize the threats of diversion of federal resources and intrusion on state and local rights.
But it is hard to believe these are the reasons. After all, the Justice Department knows that it will prosecute only the biggest pimps just as it goes after only the biggest drug dealers. It knows that pimping has long been recognized as an interstate activity with a federal role. And the Justice Department knows that the states have had very limited success when trying to convict traffickers.
A culture clash, I suspect, is the real reason for the Justice Department’s opposition. This isn’t the usual culture clash of right and left, religious and secular. In this case, the feminist, religious and secular groups that help sex-trafficking survivors are on one side. And on the other are the department’s lawyers (most of them male), the Erotic Service Providers Union and the American Civil Liberties Union — this side believes that vast numbers of women engage in prostitution as a “profession,” by choice.
As one Justice Department lawyer put it at a meeting I attended, there is “hard pimping and soft pimping.” The department’s letter hints at this view. Adult prostitutes who are transported across state lines, in violation of the Mann Act, should not receive grants under the Victims of Crime Act of 1984 because they “do not meet the legal definition of ‘victim,’” the letter states.
Both sides agree there is a small group of expensive call girls — the kind paraded in recent political scandals — who may choose to engage in prostitution. But that’s where agreement ends. Those who work with trafficking victims and those who have interviewed survivors believe that most prostitutes are poor, young, abused, harassed, raped, beaten and under the control of pimps against their will.
Put me on the side of those who have worked with the victims. I have talked with survivors all over the world, including the United States, and I share the view that these women and girls — the average age of entry into prostitution is 14 — are not participating in the “oldest profession” but in the oldest form of abuse. They are slaves.
It is hard to believe that the Justice Department’s perspective reflects the man at the top of the Bush administration. Yet the unusual anti-slavery coalition that President Bush helped to forge now finds itself battling the president’s own Justice Department.
The department lost the battle in the House, which passed the new anti-human trafficking bill almost unanimously, by a vote of 405 to 2. Unfortunately, the department seems to have more influence with the Senate, where the bill is stalled in the Judiciary Committee. And Senator Joseph R. Biden, Democrat of Delaware, has introduced a bill that largely complies with the department’s views.
The president may never have seen the Justice Department’s letter. But Representatives Carolyn Maloney, Democrat of New York, and Deborah Pryce, Republican of Ohio, two of the leaders of the Congressional Caucus on Human Trafficking, have been unable to arrange a meeting with the president to express their concerns to him.
President Bush should meet with them — and his own Justice Department — before he loses his legacy and his leadership on the abolition of modern slavery.
Monday, July 7, 2008
Op-Ed: Summer Jobs
Here's a more narrative one.
Summer’s Last Call
By FIONA MAAZEL
IN my family, there are some who practice the “All Along” method — “Didn’t get the grant? You didn’t want it all along,” “Got dumped? We hated him all along” — and whose proficiency in this method probably explains why they are nine times happier than I am. Me, I can temper — even exalt — a bad experience only by thinking of it as narrative, as story, and seeing in its grief what typifies many a good story, which is transformation.
My summer jobs of old are a terrific proving ground for this strategy. Why? Because the mandate of the summer job is to transform: to dismantle and humiliate and extract from the wreckage a finer human being. My jobs weren’t fun or lucrative — they were painful — and so for them I have a nostalgia that never seems to attach itself to the good times.
Take the summer before college: I was fired from Judy’s clothing store for my dread of the cash register. It had 9,000 buttons whose purpose I could never divine except that you had to depress them in arcane sequence to put something on layaway; if you got it wrong, the register turned shrill and angry and tolling of failures that seemed ad hominem but not unjust. My boss caught me deterring sales. “Do I look fat in this?” “Yes!” It was the summer I learned my skill set had boundaries, and that I did not know how to ask for help.
The next year, I sold knock-off perfumes in parking lots all over Los Angeles. Eterniti and Obsessssion. It was the summer I drove an old Jetta nicknamed Thomas Hardy from lot to lot, and shilled with self-disgust. It was the summer I learned that I couldn’t talk to people, let alone try to sell them ersatz perfume that smelled like gerbil and was colored no better. “Does your girlfriend smell nice? Yeah? Then she might like Obsessssion” devolved into: “Uh, hi, I’m really sorry, I’m sure you don’t want to deal with me, but I got this Obsessssion.”
And then there was my final summer job: Oxford, England, tending bar at a renowned pub. It was the summer England reached the semifinals of the European Football Championship. I drew pints for the same five guys every night. They were racist and sexist, but you hardly noticed given the jingoism roused by the soccer tournament.
I got this job because the pub owner took a shine to me. His wife, not so much. They were the roly-poliest people I’d ever met. Pale and freckled and ripe for coronary. Lived above the pub. Vacationed maybe once a year, at which point a temp bar manager would move in for the duration.
That summer’s temp was a former British paratrooper who claimed to have shrapnel loose in his head. Everyone found this revolting, except me, who started an affair with him his first night. He’d make jokes like, “So I said to the girl with the antlers, hello, dear,” and I’d laugh and be the only one.
I was in Oxford to research my senior thesis but really, I just didn’t want to go home and also, the guy with the shrapnel seemed to get me. We were dissolute. His idea of romance? A bottle of Lamb’s Dark Rum and a carton of Silk Cuts. My idea? Three of each. He rode a motorcycle. I cleaned the bar.
The same five guys gave me grief every night because I was American, but never mind, England had just routed Spain in the quarterfinals, drink up. And drink we did. I started to bloat; the trooper’s belly started to go. I was learning to make clovers in the foam head of every Guinness I served. He was learning there’s little a girl in love will not do for her paratrooper.
At the end of June, the bar owners returned a day early. The trooper and I were busted in their guest room because I refused to sneak out the back. I was an adult! An American! Also, it was our biggest night at the pub, England versus Germany in the semifinals. England, renowned for its inability to win at pretty much anything. England, the Mets of the European Union, beleaguered, embattled, pitiful.
The game had gone into penalty kicks by the time the proprietress got around to me: One-one, and she grabs a candy-striped dishrag and whales on the bar so hard, I don’t even hear the cheering for 2-2.
Three-three and she is calling me names I’d never heard spoken in real life.
Four-four, I’m dying over here and where’s my paratrooper? Watching the game. The tension is so explicit, everyone’s popping veins where veins are not common; for instance, the wife’s got one embossed on her chin.
Five-five, more screaming — I am nothing, I am trash — and I start to cry and then suddenly everyone is crying, 5-6, Germany wins, and the heart wreck that accosts me and the pub and the town and the country sends up a howl I can still hear without trying, 12 years later.
But really, my ouster and England’s on the same night? I bet I’m getting that wrong. Conflating dates. Which is, I guess, no accident. The husband refused to fire me, I refused to quit, and the paratrooper actually rode off on his motorcycle a few weeks later without a word. But that’s not enough hyperbole for me. Because the thing I didn’t say before about recasting your bad memories as narrative? Sometimes you have to exaggerate events to make them square with the degree to which they hurt.
I went back to that pub six years later. Just to say hi to my guys, who I rightly assumed would be as I’d left them, and also to check in on the bar owner, who stood up for me. He wasn’t there so I said I’d come back in a few hours. When I did, my guys were upset and before I saw in this cause to retreat, out came the owner’s wife with that same dishrag in hand. Brandishing the rag, in fact, and chasing me out of the pub. Her rage was unabated. I was all the things she’d called me back then and more, because I’d had the gall to return.
She had a point. That first time around, getting my character thrashed simply bowed to the rubric of the summer job. I had, after all, learned a lesson. It was bad form to fall in love with your boss and worse to fall for a boss who does not love you back. I had aged 10 years in three months, and I’d like to think I got smarter about how to allocate my feelings. I must have, since I tell this story a lot.
But for the second time, just coming back to visit, I was well out of college, which meant that summer’s most notable feature wasn’t a job, but the two-week furlough from the job I had all year. Nothing transformative going on there, just the harrowing stuff your life can become, absent a mandate to learn. And in that experience, I see no story at all.
Summer’s Last Call
By FIONA MAAZEL
IN my family, there are some who practice the “All Along” method — “Didn’t get the grant? You didn’t want it all along,” “Got dumped? We hated him all along” — and whose proficiency in this method probably explains why they are nine times happier than I am. Me, I can temper — even exalt — a bad experience only by thinking of it as narrative, as story, and seeing in its grief what typifies many a good story, which is transformation.
My summer jobs of old are a terrific proving ground for this strategy. Why? Because the mandate of the summer job is to transform: to dismantle and humiliate and extract from the wreckage a finer human being. My jobs weren’t fun or lucrative — they were painful — and so for them I have a nostalgia that never seems to attach itself to the good times.
Take the summer before college: I was fired from Judy’s clothing store for my dread of the cash register. It had 9,000 buttons whose purpose I could never divine except that you had to depress them in arcane sequence to put something on layaway; if you got it wrong, the register turned shrill and angry and tolling of failures that seemed ad hominem but not unjust. My boss caught me deterring sales. “Do I look fat in this?” “Yes!” It was the summer I learned my skill set had boundaries, and that I did not know how to ask for help.
The next year, I sold knock-off perfumes in parking lots all over Los Angeles. Eterniti and Obsessssion. It was the summer I drove an old Jetta nicknamed Thomas Hardy from lot to lot, and shilled with self-disgust. It was the summer I learned that I couldn’t talk to people, let alone try to sell them ersatz perfume that smelled like gerbil and was colored no better. “Does your girlfriend smell nice? Yeah? Then she might like Obsessssion” devolved into: “Uh, hi, I’m really sorry, I’m sure you don’t want to deal with me, but I got this Obsessssion.”
And then there was my final summer job: Oxford, England, tending bar at a renowned pub. It was the summer England reached the semifinals of the European Football Championship. I drew pints for the same five guys every night. They were racist and sexist, but you hardly noticed given the jingoism roused by the soccer tournament.
I got this job because the pub owner took a shine to me. His wife, not so much. They were the roly-poliest people I’d ever met. Pale and freckled and ripe for coronary. Lived above the pub. Vacationed maybe once a year, at which point a temp bar manager would move in for the duration.
That summer’s temp was a former British paratrooper who claimed to have shrapnel loose in his head. Everyone found this revolting, except me, who started an affair with him his first night. He’d make jokes like, “So I said to the girl with the antlers, hello, dear,” and I’d laugh and be the only one.
I was in Oxford to research my senior thesis but really, I just didn’t want to go home and also, the guy with the shrapnel seemed to get me. We were dissolute. His idea of romance? A bottle of Lamb’s Dark Rum and a carton of Silk Cuts. My idea? Three of each. He rode a motorcycle. I cleaned the bar.
The same five guys gave me grief every night because I was American, but never mind, England had just routed Spain in the quarterfinals, drink up. And drink we did. I started to bloat; the trooper’s belly started to go. I was learning to make clovers in the foam head of every Guinness I served. He was learning there’s little a girl in love will not do for her paratrooper.
At the end of June, the bar owners returned a day early. The trooper and I were busted in their guest room because I refused to sneak out the back. I was an adult! An American! Also, it was our biggest night at the pub, England versus Germany in the semifinals. England, renowned for its inability to win at pretty much anything. England, the Mets of the European Union, beleaguered, embattled, pitiful.
The game had gone into penalty kicks by the time the proprietress got around to me: One-one, and she grabs a candy-striped dishrag and whales on the bar so hard, I don’t even hear the cheering for 2-2.
Three-three and she is calling me names I’d never heard spoken in real life.
Four-four, I’m dying over here and where’s my paratrooper? Watching the game. The tension is so explicit, everyone’s popping veins where veins are not common; for instance, the wife’s got one embossed on her chin.
Five-five, more screaming — I am nothing, I am trash — and I start to cry and then suddenly everyone is crying, 5-6, Germany wins, and the heart wreck that accosts me and the pub and the town and the country sends up a howl I can still hear without trying, 12 years later.
But really, my ouster and England’s on the same night? I bet I’m getting that wrong. Conflating dates. Which is, I guess, no accident. The husband refused to fire me, I refused to quit, and the paratrooper actually rode off on his motorcycle a few weeks later without a word. But that’s not enough hyperbole for me. Because the thing I didn’t say before about recasting your bad memories as narrative? Sometimes you have to exaggerate events to make them square with the degree to which they hurt.
I went back to that pub six years later. Just to say hi to my guys, who I rightly assumed would be as I’d left them, and also to check in on the bar owner, who stood up for me. He wasn’t there so I said I’d come back in a few hours. When I did, my guys were upset and before I saw in this cause to retreat, out came the owner’s wife with that same dishrag in hand. Brandishing the rag, in fact, and chasing me out of the pub. Her rage was unabated. I was all the things she’d called me back then and more, because I’d had the gall to return.
She had a point. That first time around, getting my character thrashed simply bowed to the rubric of the summer job. I had, after all, learned a lesson. It was bad form to fall in love with your boss and worse to fall for a boss who does not love you back. I had aged 10 years in three months, and I’d like to think I got smarter about how to allocate my feelings. I must have, since I tell this story a lot.
But for the second time, just coming back to visit, I was well out of college, which meant that summer’s most notable feature wasn’t a job, but the two-week furlough from the job I had all year. Nothing transformative going on there, just the harrowing stuff your life can become, absent a mandate to learn. And in that experience, I see no story at all.
Monday, June 30, 2008
Example: Jacob MaGraw-Mickelson
Here's a solution to the Bananas Op-Ed. Quite an unusual one... he must have had a lot of space on the page. Click for larger view. By Jacob MaGraw-Mickelson, who appears to work mostly as a fine artist.
Op-Ed: Bees
Bee by Bee
By JONATHAN DAVID FARLEY
IN the closing months of 2006, thousands of American bee hives were found to be almost entirely devoid of bees, victims of a mysterious phenomenon now known as colony collapse disorder. A study of 150,000 managed bee colonies in 15 states, commissioned by the Apiary Inspectors of America, found that from September 2006 to March 2007, roughly one-third of the colonies were lost.
Bee keepers have suffered similar unexplained losses in the past, and not all of the hives in the survey were lost to whatever is causing colony collapse. But people are understandably worried that the disorder may threaten all three million managed bee colonies in the United States, a $14.6 billion commercial pollination business. So it is urgent that scientists figure out what is causing the colonies to disappear and how many more colonies stand to vanish.
Many scientists have suggested that some kind of virus or bacterium — or some combination of infectious agents, possibly carried by parasites like mites — is killing the bees. One way to find out if the culprit really is a contagion (as opposed to an environmental threat like pesticides or some other unknown factor), and to gauge its potential strength, is to look closer at the information we have by using a mathematical model, similar to those used to assess human epidemics.
For example, there is a model that was used in 2003 to figure out whether severe acute respiratory syndrome could be brought under control. Marc Lipsitch, an epidemiologist at Harvard’s School of Public Health, used a statistical method to determine the “reproductive ratio,” the expected number of people the average sick person would infect. If this number is larger than one, the illness will spread.
Professor Lipsitch found that each person with SARS would infect, on average, three other people. So in order to force the reproductive ratio below one, at least two-thirds of these infections needed to be blocked — mainly by isolating people who had been in contact with SARS victims.
A similar model can perhaps be used to study colony collapse disorder. Using the data from the inspectors’ survey, we can assume that one-third of 150,000 colonies die off over the course of six months. Supposing that during the same time the number of infected but not yet collapsed colonies declines (as it would if the most destructive phase of the problem is behind us), then using standard equations that govern epidemics we can conclude that we must have started with at least 10,000 infected (but not yet collapsed) colonies.
If we knew the true number of healthy colonies at the beginning of the six months, as well as the probabilities that an exposed colony will become sick and that a sick colony will die in a given amount of time, we could also calculate the number expected to die in the future. Since we don’t know those quantities, we must do the calculation for every possible set of values.
What we find is that of the original 150,000 colonies, the number of those that will eventually succumb to colony collapse is never higher than 110,000. So if colony collapse is in fact caused by some sort of contagion, a significant proportion of colonies will survive the outbreak. If it turns out that far more colonies are lost, it will be evidence that something is wrong with our model: perhaps it is too crude, perhaps we need better data, or perhaps a contagion is not responsible for colony collapse disorder after all.
Our mathematical model could make more accurate predictions if it could take into account interactions between different colonies. More detailed information about the location and movements of individual colonies would enable us to use more sophisticated modeling to get a clearer picture of how colony collapse takes its toll. We might be able to work out the rate of transmission, the probability that an infected colony will die, when the outbreak actually began and when it might end.
The more accurate our predictions, the more clearly we will be able to see the task ahead. Scientists may be able to zero in on the possible contagious cause of colony collapse. Bee experts could then assess quarantine strategies.
Our first priority should be to gather more accurate information about the bees’ disappearance. The war against colony collapse is about numbers.
By JONATHAN DAVID FARLEY
IN the closing months of 2006, thousands of American bee hives were found to be almost entirely devoid of bees, victims of a mysterious phenomenon now known as colony collapse disorder. A study of 150,000 managed bee colonies in 15 states, commissioned by the Apiary Inspectors of America, found that from September 2006 to March 2007, roughly one-third of the colonies were lost.
Bee keepers have suffered similar unexplained losses in the past, and not all of the hives in the survey were lost to whatever is causing colony collapse. But people are understandably worried that the disorder may threaten all three million managed bee colonies in the United States, a $14.6 billion commercial pollination business. So it is urgent that scientists figure out what is causing the colonies to disappear and how many more colonies stand to vanish.
Many scientists have suggested that some kind of virus or bacterium — or some combination of infectious agents, possibly carried by parasites like mites — is killing the bees. One way to find out if the culprit really is a contagion (as opposed to an environmental threat like pesticides or some other unknown factor), and to gauge its potential strength, is to look closer at the information we have by using a mathematical model, similar to those used to assess human epidemics.
For example, there is a model that was used in 2003 to figure out whether severe acute respiratory syndrome could be brought under control. Marc Lipsitch, an epidemiologist at Harvard’s School of Public Health, used a statistical method to determine the “reproductive ratio,” the expected number of people the average sick person would infect. If this number is larger than one, the illness will spread.
Professor Lipsitch found that each person with SARS would infect, on average, three other people. So in order to force the reproductive ratio below one, at least two-thirds of these infections needed to be blocked — mainly by isolating people who had been in contact with SARS victims.
A similar model can perhaps be used to study colony collapse disorder. Using the data from the inspectors’ survey, we can assume that one-third of 150,000 colonies die off over the course of six months. Supposing that during the same time the number of infected but not yet collapsed colonies declines (as it would if the most destructive phase of the problem is behind us), then using standard equations that govern epidemics we can conclude that we must have started with at least 10,000 infected (but not yet collapsed) colonies.
If we knew the true number of healthy colonies at the beginning of the six months, as well as the probabilities that an exposed colony will become sick and that a sick colony will die in a given amount of time, we could also calculate the number expected to die in the future. Since we don’t know those quantities, we must do the calculation for every possible set of values.
What we find is that of the original 150,000 colonies, the number of those that will eventually succumb to colony collapse is never higher than 110,000. So if colony collapse is in fact caused by some sort of contagion, a significant proportion of colonies will survive the outbreak. If it turns out that far more colonies are lost, it will be evidence that something is wrong with our model: perhaps it is too crude, perhaps we need better data, or perhaps a contagion is not responsible for colony collapse disorder after all.
Our mathematical model could make more accurate predictions if it could take into account interactions between different colonies. More detailed information about the location and movements of individual colonies would enable us to use more sophisticated modeling to get a clearer picture of how colony collapse takes its toll. We might be able to work out the rate of transmission, the probability that an infected colony will die, when the outbreak actually began and when it might end.
The more accurate our predictions, the more clearly we will be able to see the task ahead. Scientists may be able to zero in on the possible contagious cause of colony collapse. Bee experts could then assess quarantine strategies.
Our first priority should be to gather more accurate information about the bees’ disappearance. The war against colony collapse is about numbers.
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
Example: Jason Holley
Here's the illustration that ran with the Hoopoe article. If you'll recall, it was about the bird, which holds meaning in religious and historical texts, becoming designated the official bird of Israel.
By Jason Holley.
Op-Ed: Bananas
Yes, We Will Have No Bananas
By DAN KOEPPEL
ONCE you become accustomed to gas at $4 a gallon, brace yourself for the next shocking retail threshold: bananas reaching $1 a pound. At that price, Americans may stop thinking of bananas as a cheap staple, and then a strategy that has served the big banana companies for more than a century — enabling them to turn an exotic, tropical fruit into an everyday favorite — will begin to unravel.
The immediate reasons for the price increase are the rising cost of oil and reduced supply caused by floods in Ecuador, the world’s biggest banana exporter. But something larger is going on that will affect prices for years to come.
That bananas have long been the cheapest fruit at the grocery store is astonishing. They’re grown thousands of miles away, they must be transported in cooled containers and even then they survive no more than two weeks after they’re cut off the tree. Apples, in contrast, are typically grown within a few hundred miles of the store and keep for months in a basket out in the garage. Yet apples traditionally have cost at least twice as much per pound as bananas.
Americans eat as many bananas as apples and oranges combined, which is especially amazing when you consider that not so long ago, bananas were virtually unknown here. They became a staple only after the men who in the late 19th century founded the United Fruit Company (today’s Chiquita) figured out how to get bananas to American tables quickly — by clearing rainforest in Latin America, building railroads and communication networks and inventing refrigeration techniques to control ripening. The banana barons also marketed their product in ways that had never occurred to farmers or grocers before, by offering discount coupons, writing jingles and placing bananas in schoolbooks and on picture postcards. They even hired doctors to convince mothers that bananas were good for children.
Once bananas had become widely popular, the companies kept costs low by exercising iron-fisted control over the Latin American countries where the fruit was grown. Workers could not be allowed such basic rights as health care, decent wages or the right to congregate. (In 1929, Colombian troops shot down banana workers and their families who were gathered in a town square after church.) Governments could not be anything but utterly pliable. Over and over, banana companies, aided by the American military, intervened whenever there was a chance that any “banana republic” might end its cooperation. (In 1954, United Fruit helped arrange the overthrow of the democratically elected government of Guatemala.) Labor is still cheap in these countries, and growers still resort to heavy-handed tactics.
The final piece of the banana pricing equation is genetics. Unlike apple and orange growers, banana importers sell only a single variety of their fruit, the Cavendish. There are more than 1,000 varieties of bananas — most of them in Africa and Asia — but except for an occasional exotic, the Cavendish is the only banana we see in our markets. It is the only kind that is shipped and eaten everywhere from Beijing to Berlin, Moscow to Minneapolis.
By sticking to this single variety, the banana industry ensures that all the bananas in a shipment ripen at the same rate, creating huge economies of scale. The Cavendish is the fruit equivalent of a fast-food hamburger: efficient to produce, uniform in quality and universally affordable.
But there’s a difference between a banana and a Big Mac: The banana is a living organism. It can get sick, and since bananas all come from the same gene pool, a virulent enough malady could wipe out the world’s commercial banana crop in a matter of years.
This has happened before. Our great-grandparents grew up eating not the Cavendish but the Gros Michel banana, a variety that everyone agreed was tastier. But starting in the early 1900s, banana plantations were invaded by a fungus called Panama disease and vanished one by one. Forest would be cleared for new banana fields, and healthy fruit would grow there for a while, but eventually succumb.
By 1960, the Gros Michel was essentially extinct and the banana industry nearly bankrupt. It was saved at the last minute by the Cavendish, a Chinese variety that had been considered something close to junk: inferior in taste, easy to bruise (and therefore hard to ship) and too small to appeal to consumers. But it did resist the blight.
Over the past decade, however, a new, more virulent strain of Panama disease has begun to spread across the world, and this time the Cavendish is not immune. The fungus is expected to reach Latin America in 5 to 10 years, maybe 20. The big banana companies have been slow to finance efforts to find either a cure for the fungus or a banana that resists it. Nor has enough been done to aid efforts to diversify the world’s banana crop by preserving little-known varieties of the fruit that grow in Africa and Asia.
In recent years, American consumers have begun seeing the benefits — to health, to the economy and to the environment — of buying foods that are grown close to our homes. Getting used to life without bananas will take some adjustment. What other fruit can you slice onto your breakfast cereal?
But bananas have always been an emblem of a long-distance food chain. Perhaps it’s time we recognize bananas for what they are: an exotic fruit that, some day soon, may slip beyond our reach.
By DAN KOEPPEL
ONCE you become accustomed to gas at $4 a gallon, brace yourself for the next shocking retail threshold: bananas reaching $1 a pound. At that price, Americans may stop thinking of bananas as a cheap staple, and then a strategy that has served the big banana companies for more than a century — enabling them to turn an exotic, tropical fruit into an everyday favorite — will begin to unravel.
The immediate reasons for the price increase are the rising cost of oil and reduced supply caused by floods in Ecuador, the world’s biggest banana exporter. But something larger is going on that will affect prices for years to come.
That bananas have long been the cheapest fruit at the grocery store is astonishing. They’re grown thousands of miles away, they must be transported in cooled containers and even then they survive no more than two weeks after they’re cut off the tree. Apples, in contrast, are typically grown within a few hundred miles of the store and keep for months in a basket out in the garage. Yet apples traditionally have cost at least twice as much per pound as bananas.
Americans eat as many bananas as apples and oranges combined, which is especially amazing when you consider that not so long ago, bananas were virtually unknown here. They became a staple only after the men who in the late 19th century founded the United Fruit Company (today’s Chiquita) figured out how to get bananas to American tables quickly — by clearing rainforest in Latin America, building railroads and communication networks and inventing refrigeration techniques to control ripening. The banana barons also marketed their product in ways that had never occurred to farmers or grocers before, by offering discount coupons, writing jingles and placing bananas in schoolbooks and on picture postcards. They even hired doctors to convince mothers that bananas were good for children.
Once bananas had become widely popular, the companies kept costs low by exercising iron-fisted control over the Latin American countries where the fruit was grown. Workers could not be allowed such basic rights as health care, decent wages or the right to congregate. (In 1929, Colombian troops shot down banana workers and their families who were gathered in a town square after church.) Governments could not be anything but utterly pliable. Over and over, banana companies, aided by the American military, intervened whenever there was a chance that any “banana republic” might end its cooperation. (In 1954, United Fruit helped arrange the overthrow of the democratically elected government of Guatemala.) Labor is still cheap in these countries, and growers still resort to heavy-handed tactics.
The final piece of the banana pricing equation is genetics. Unlike apple and orange growers, banana importers sell only a single variety of their fruit, the Cavendish. There are more than 1,000 varieties of bananas — most of them in Africa and Asia — but except for an occasional exotic, the Cavendish is the only banana we see in our markets. It is the only kind that is shipped and eaten everywhere from Beijing to Berlin, Moscow to Minneapolis.
By sticking to this single variety, the banana industry ensures that all the bananas in a shipment ripen at the same rate, creating huge economies of scale. The Cavendish is the fruit equivalent of a fast-food hamburger: efficient to produce, uniform in quality and universally affordable.
But there’s a difference between a banana and a Big Mac: The banana is a living organism. It can get sick, and since bananas all come from the same gene pool, a virulent enough malady could wipe out the world’s commercial banana crop in a matter of years.
This has happened before. Our great-grandparents grew up eating not the Cavendish but the Gros Michel banana, a variety that everyone agreed was tastier. But starting in the early 1900s, banana plantations were invaded by a fungus called Panama disease and vanished one by one. Forest would be cleared for new banana fields, and healthy fruit would grow there for a while, but eventually succumb.
By 1960, the Gros Michel was essentially extinct and the banana industry nearly bankrupt. It was saved at the last minute by the Cavendish, a Chinese variety that had been considered something close to junk: inferior in taste, easy to bruise (and therefore hard to ship) and too small to appeal to consumers. But it did resist the blight.
Over the past decade, however, a new, more virulent strain of Panama disease has begun to spread across the world, and this time the Cavendish is not immune. The fungus is expected to reach Latin America in 5 to 10 years, maybe 20. The big banana companies have been slow to finance efforts to find either a cure for the fungus or a banana that resists it. Nor has enough been done to aid efforts to diversify the world’s banana crop by preserving little-known varieties of the fruit that grow in Africa and Asia.
In recent years, American consumers have begun seeing the benefits — to health, to the economy and to the environment — of buying foods that are grown close to our homes. Getting used to life without bananas will take some adjustment. What other fruit can you slice onto your breakfast cereal?
But bananas have always been an emblem of a long-distance food chain. Perhaps it’s time we recognize bananas for what they are: an exotic fruit that, some day soon, may slip beyond our reach.
Monday, June 23, 2008
Sunday, June 22, 2008
Example: Sam Weber
An Op-Ed about obtaining evidence through torture, by Sam Weber.
It's a great thing to remember that you don't need to use people all the time. It can be liberating and allows you to fit your vocabulary (ie. "what you like to draw and are good at drawing") to different solutions.
It's a great thing to remember that you don't need to use people all the time. It can be liberating and allows you to fit your vocabulary (ie. "what you like to draw and are good at drawing") to different solutions.
Example: John Hendrix
Here's another example, in a very different style from Paul's. It's from John Hendrix. Sez John:
This one is running on the New York Times Op-Ed page today. In hopes to save the earth from the millions of plastic water bottles used every year by city dwellers, New York is hoping to make their public fountains suitable for drinking.
This one is running on the New York Times Op-Ed page today. In hopes to save the earth from the millions of plastic water bottles used every year by city dwellers, New York is hoping to make their public fountains suitable for drinking.
Sunday, June 15, 2008
Op-Ed: Hoopoe
In an effort to increase participation, I'm going to post a few different articles per week. Hopefully one of them will strike your fancy.
Will Peace Take Flight?
By JONATHAN ROSEN
LATE last month, Israel announced that it had named the hoopoe as its national bird. The long-billed hoopoe, which has a punky orange crest tipped black, is barely mentioned in the Bible (as an unclean animal that may not be eaten) but it plays a role in rabbinic literature and in Islamic lore as well. It is celebrated, among other things, as the messenger that shuttles between King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. It is in other words well suited to the symbolic burden the country has placed on it.
The idea that birds can be emissaries to a battered world — like the dove and raven sent out by Noah — motivated Israel’s decision to adopt a national bird as part of its commemoration of 60 years of statehood. In Hebrew the name of the bird is duchifat. In Arabic it is hud hud. And in English hoopoe is a word that sounds, as Emily Dickinson noted about all feathered creatures, strangely like hope.
The news was announced at the official residence of the president of Israel, Shimon Peres, who in the late 1940s changed his name from Persky to Peres because he saw a giant lammergeier, or bearded vulture (in Hebrew, a “peres”), circling overhead. Legend has it that the lammergeier, which no longer breeds in Israel, killed the Greek tragedian Aeschylus by dropping a tortoise on his head. Birds can be dangerous, which is precisely why the United States chose the bald eagle, though Benjamin Franklin complained, in a letter to his daughter, that the eagle was a cowardly bully while the turkey was nobler and feistier and therefore a more apt symbol for America.
In Franklin’s time, a young democracy wanted a warrior bird; in the 21st century other considerations carry the day. The cross-section of Israelis who did the voting to choose a national bird — including schoolchildren, soldiers, academics and Knesset members — rejected the possibility of a raptor (specifically, the much-loved, and endangered, griffon vulture) as sending the wrong signal for the country. They also rejected the night owl, which Arabs believe to be an evil omen.
I first saw a hoopoe in 2000, the year the Oslo Accords officially fell apart. I had known about the bird since childhood, when I learned that King Solomon — who, with his storied ability to understand the speech of animals is the Dr. Doolittle of Judaism — had sought out the hoopoe in order to build the Temple. It had not occurred to me, until I began bird-watching, that the bird was real.
But there I was, in a small bird observatory in Jerusalem, with a soldier whose job it was to net migrating birds, weigh them and then toss them back into the air. “Filthy birds,” he said, pointing out one that was heading for a hole in a wall and then adding that they reeked of excrement. So much for the bird who helped the king build a house for God. It was, however, a lesson worthy of Solomon, seeing this lofty bird that smells of mortality. It is the nature of birds to embody multiple elements, shuttling as they do between earth and sky, between ancient and modern, between wild and tame. They are emblems of our heavenly aspirations and yet they are the closest living relatives to the dinosaurs.
The search for a national bird was organized by the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel and led by an Israeli ornithologist, Yossi Leshem. Dr. Leshem has created the International Center for Bird Migration in Latrun, the site of some very bloody battles in Israel’s War of Independence and home to a vast war memorial. The center’s hopeful slogan, printed in Hebrew, Arabic and English, is “Migrating birds know no boundaries,” in contrast to the people on the ground, for whom boundaries are everything. This gives birdlife an added poignancy in Israel.
Israel is a surprisingly good place for bird-watching (half a billion birds fly through the country during migration, converging from Africa, Asia and Europe). Jeremiah noted that “the stork in the heaven knoweth her appointed times” and she still does — every year, 85 percent of the world’s white stork population migrates over Israel, despite the general upheaval of the world below.
A hoopoe is the hero of the Persian poet Farid al-Din Attar’s “Conference of the Birds,” a medieval allegory in which a group of birds sets out to find the king of the birds. The hoopoe is their leader, artfully persuading all the reluctant birds to come on the quest. In the end, they manage to find the king of the birds, who turns out to be God. The birds that have made it into the bird king’s presence are filled with radiant insight but they are consumed — they discover they are part of God and they are obliterated in the divine effulgence. This is a happy ending if you are a mystic but it is chilling if you are not.
Attar, a Sufi, believed that all religions are a path to God. It is part of the endless irony of history that the place where Attar once lived (and that in fact expelled him for heresy) today threatens with obliteration those nations, most especially the Jewish state, that it deems an abomination. Whether even the wisdom of King Solomon, and his magical avian emissary, can devise an answer to this threat is one of the great challenges of the coming days.
Will Peace Take Flight?
By JONATHAN ROSEN
LATE last month, Israel announced that it had named the hoopoe as its national bird. The long-billed hoopoe, which has a punky orange crest tipped black, is barely mentioned in the Bible (as an unclean animal that may not be eaten) but it plays a role in rabbinic literature and in Islamic lore as well. It is celebrated, among other things, as the messenger that shuttles between King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. It is in other words well suited to the symbolic burden the country has placed on it.
The idea that birds can be emissaries to a battered world — like the dove and raven sent out by Noah — motivated Israel’s decision to adopt a national bird as part of its commemoration of 60 years of statehood. In Hebrew the name of the bird is duchifat. In Arabic it is hud hud. And in English hoopoe is a word that sounds, as Emily Dickinson noted about all feathered creatures, strangely like hope.
The news was announced at the official residence of the president of Israel, Shimon Peres, who in the late 1940s changed his name from Persky to Peres because he saw a giant lammergeier, or bearded vulture (in Hebrew, a “peres”), circling overhead. Legend has it that the lammergeier, which no longer breeds in Israel, killed the Greek tragedian Aeschylus by dropping a tortoise on his head. Birds can be dangerous, which is precisely why the United States chose the bald eagle, though Benjamin Franklin complained, in a letter to his daughter, that the eagle was a cowardly bully while the turkey was nobler and feistier and therefore a more apt symbol for America.
In Franklin’s time, a young democracy wanted a warrior bird; in the 21st century other considerations carry the day. The cross-section of Israelis who did the voting to choose a national bird — including schoolchildren, soldiers, academics and Knesset members — rejected the possibility of a raptor (specifically, the much-loved, and endangered, griffon vulture) as sending the wrong signal for the country. They also rejected the night owl, which Arabs believe to be an evil omen.
I first saw a hoopoe in 2000, the year the Oslo Accords officially fell apart. I had known about the bird since childhood, when I learned that King Solomon — who, with his storied ability to understand the speech of animals is the Dr. Doolittle of Judaism — had sought out the hoopoe in order to build the Temple. It had not occurred to me, until I began bird-watching, that the bird was real.
But there I was, in a small bird observatory in Jerusalem, with a soldier whose job it was to net migrating birds, weigh them and then toss them back into the air. “Filthy birds,” he said, pointing out one that was heading for a hole in a wall and then adding that they reeked of excrement. So much for the bird who helped the king build a house for God. It was, however, a lesson worthy of Solomon, seeing this lofty bird that smells of mortality. It is the nature of birds to embody multiple elements, shuttling as they do between earth and sky, between ancient and modern, between wild and tame. They are emblems of our heavenly aspirations and yet they are the closest living relatives to the dinosaurs.
The search for a national bird was organized by the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel and led by an Israeli ornithologist, Yossi Leshem. Dr. Leshem has created the International Center for Bird Migration in Latrun, the site of some very bloody battles in Israel’s War of Independence and home to a vast war memorial. The center’s hopeful slogan, printed in Hebrew, Arabic and English, is “Migrating birds know no boundaries,” in contrast to the people on the ground, for whom boundaries are everything. This gives birdlife an added poignancy in Israel.
Israel is a surprisingly good place for bird-watching (half a billion birds fly through the country during migration, converging from Africa, Asia and Europe). Jeremiah noted that “the stork in the heaven knoweth her appointed times” and she still does — every year, 85 percent of the world’s white stork population migrates over Israel, despite the general upheaval of the world below.
A hoopoe is the hero of the Persian poet Farid al-Din Attar’s “Conference of the Birds,” a medieval allegory in which a group of birds sets out to find the king of the birds. The hoopoe is their leader, artfully persuading all the reluctant birds to come on the quest. In the end, they manage to find the king of the birds, who turns out to be God. The birds that have made it into the bird king’s presence are filled with radiant insight but they are consumed — they discover they are part of God and they are obliterated in the divine effulgence. This is a happy ending if you are a mystic but it is chilling if you are not.
Attar, a Sufi, believed that all religions are a path to God. It is part of the endless irony of history that the place where Attar once lived (and that in fact expelled him for heresy) today threatens with obliteration those nations, most especially the Jewish state, that it deems an abomination. Whether even the wisdom of King Solomon, and his magical avian emissary, can devise an answer to this threat is one of the great challenges of the coming days.
Saturday, June 14, 2008
Op-Ed: Croutons
Okay, here's the next one. It's a fun one.
Croutons From My Father
By MEREDITH HOFFA
THE doorbell rings, and when I see it’s the U.P.S. guy I nearly hyperventilate. Few things on earth make me more insanely excited than U.P.S. Especially when I’m not expecting anything. Immediately I think: it’s happened, someone has sent me gourmet steaks.
I sign, and am handed a small padded envelope that I promptly ravage.
It’s croutons.
Not steaks at all; just a tiny, semi-crushed plastic tub of gross-looking croutons.
•
It all started a year ago when my dad and I were hunkered down in his TV room. I was on the floor stretching, which is what I tend to do when I’m not quite sure what to do. He was in his special zero-gravity recliner and, aside from the neck brace, looked more or less the same as always: Red Sox cap, blue sweatpants with the waistband inexplicably pulled up to mid-torso, fingernails buffed to a disco-ball sheen. Same as always, he was mauling one Tootsie Pop after another in that eardrum-shattering way that honestly makes me want to stop living.
Our job was to pass three long days together. He had a back injury and was in between surgeries, and my mom had asked if I could come to Boston to hang out with him while she was out of town. He wasn’t fully bedridden or anything; mostly, he could just use some help passing the timeless time. Our phone calls made clear he was restless and depressed, but it wasn’t until I saw him in person that it hit me just how isolated he was. Mostly because of how intimate he’d become with various television shows, particularly “Kathy Griffin: My Life on the D-List.”
“I just don’t understand why she didn’t get a flat-screen for the master bedroom,” he said, brow furrowed in genuine bewilderment. “She said she wanted sleek and sexy — but then she goes and gets a rise-up TV?”
I felt compelled to respond even though he wasn’t really talking to me. “Yeah ... I don’t know.”
“I bet Mike talked her into it.” Then, he shook his head ruefully. “Like that guy even has any credentials!”
•
I hadn’t wanted to go. It had been years since my dad and I had hung out, just us two. I worried about what it would be like without the noise of other family around.
The thing is, when I was a teenager, my dad and I had been good buddies. I was him, everyone said. A mini-him. I was into the things that mattered to him: politics, debate, all that. Back then it really looked as though I was becoming a chip off the old block.
Gradually, though, it stopped being that way. During my 20s there were endless fights, fights that were truly harrowing and unnerving, like the one that exploded the day before my wedding. The topic — would we or would we not perform our father-daughter dance to the hideous “Can You Feel the Love Tonight?” — was silly. But the battle itself was disconcertingly stormy and thoughts of it still make my stomach churn.
These days, though, there’s quiet. And distance. There’s the fact that I live 3,000 miles away. But there’s also that I no longer have his name, I no longer lead a life that resembles his in any discernible way. I knew we loved each other, but there was the distinct possibility that a visit would reveal we didn’t actually like each other much at all.
Yet the weekend came and I found myself there.
“I’m glad to see you,” he said when I arrived. It was the wee hours and he’d shuffled out of bed to greet me, his eyes at half-mast, shoulders slightly hunched. He looked older, I thought. He apologized for needing to head back to bed, but, actually, I was relieved to be left alone.
•
The next day in the TV room, I got a taste of how slowly time passed there. After hours that felt like days, I needed a change of scenery, so I went to the kitchen and embarked on a wildly invigorating cleaning spree. My dad kept me company while I O.C.D.’ed out.
I flat-out adore cleaning, but my parents’ kitchen, loaded with random, useless stuff, was a bit of an adventure. Only once I was done purging things — like year-old Jordan almonds, mildew-y tennis headbands, a sandwich baggie of broken coffee mug — could the actual scrubbing begin in earnest. And that day, amid the counter fray: croutons. Picture a small, clear plastic tub containing maybe five stale-looking croutons. The kind that come with a Caesar salad from a pizza place but that no one on earth has ever actually eaten.
I waved the croutons at my dad as I went to the trash. “I’m throwing these away, O.K.?”
Since it wasn’t really a question, I was surprised when he stopped me.
“Wait,” he said. “Don’t.”
I eyed him quizzically.
“Well,” he said, the tiniest shade of sheepishness creeping into his voice. “What if someone maybe needs them?”
Right. What if someone maybe needs them. Like, down the line. That’s perfect.
•
My parents cannot throw anything away. At the point at which the average person will dispose of an item, my parents will just move it — to the basement, to the attic or simply off to the side. “Go ahead, laugh,” my mom’s always saying. “You don’t know what might come in handy later.”
But personally I don’t see how a papier-mâché head could come in handy later. Or a tower of browning New Yorker magazines. Or a bowl full of keys to nothing, an IV contraption from when the cat had a urinary tract infection or a shiny plastic top hat emblazoned with “Happy New Year! Y2K, you’re O.K.!”
Or croutons.
Me, I’m intensely clutter-averse. I know I get rid of items prematurely, but the pleasure I derive from throwing a thing away probably outweighs the pleasure I’d derive from using that thing down the line. I even like throwing files away on my computer because of that intoxicating sound the trash folder makes.
•
So there I was in my parents’ kitchen, sponge in one hand, croutons in the other, just standing there with my skinny-legged, reality-television-obsessed dad. And suddenly this rumbling laugh bubbled up from deep inside me and once it started it would not stop. My dad joined in, giggling at first, then erupting into his full-blown sputtering/snorting combo and together we just stood there, doubled over and howling for I don’t know how long. Both of us kept trying to speak, but the only word that managed to squeak its way out was “croutons.”
For the next three days, we spent most of our hours back in the TV room. In between shows, and over shows, we talked. There was, of course, lots of discussion about Kathy Griffin (Me: “Maybe she should think about getting an agent who doesn’t avoid her calls?”), but we also covered topics from peacoats (concurring on their classic cuteness) and manicures (life-enhancing and a helpful deterrent for us nail-biters). I walked him through a day in my life in Los Angeles, and at one point found myself talking about how I want to be a writer. Whenever we got hungry I’d heat up food the neighbors brought over, which we’d eat on those tremendously exciting little TV trays.
My dad kept apologizing for being laid-up and unfun. I told him it was O.K., because it was. Anyway, it was possible I was having fun. I guess I must’ve been since I was forgetting to be nervous.
On the day I was leaving, I opened my makeup case to find — nestled innocently inside — the tub of croutons. I screeched with delight and could hear my dad giggling from the TV room. That night, before heading out to the taxi, I put the croutons in his medicine cabinet. Right between the Tinactin and the Ban unscented roll-on.
In the year since, the croutons have seen a lot of action, volleying between the East and West Coasts, hiding, then re-appearing in delightfully cunning places. The U.P.S. delivery was one of my dad’s craftier moves, but it wasn’t half as good as the time I brought the croutons to my cousin’s wedding in Chicago and, in an electrifying coup, had one of the waiters serve the croutons to my dad beside his salad. Right now that little plastic tub is back in Dad’s possession, but I’m pretty sure I’m onto his game plan: he’s having the croutons lay low in the hopes that I’ll forget about them. He thinks he can catch me off guard and fully blow my mind with the next Crouton Appearance.
And to that I say: bring it on.
Croutons From My Father
By MEREDITH HOFFA
THE doorbell rings, and when I see it’s the U.P.S. guy I nearly hyperventilate. Few things on earth make me more insanely excited than U.P.S. Especially when I’m not expecting anything. Immediately I think: it’s happened, someone has sent me gourmet steaks.
I sign, and am handed a small padded envelope that I promptly ravage.
It’s croutons.
Not steaks at all; just a tiny, semi-crushed plastic tub of gross-looking croutons.
•
It all started a year ago when my dad and I were hunkered down in his TV room. I was on the floor stretching, which is what I tend to do when I’m not quite sure what to do. He was in his special zero-gravity recliner and, aside from the neck brace, looked more or less the same as always: Red Sox cap, blue sweatpants with the waistband inexplicably pulled up to mid-torso, fingernails buffed to a disco-ball sheen. Same as always, he was mauling one Tootsie Pop after another in that eardrum-shattering way that honestly makes me want to stop living.
Our job was to pass three long days together. He had a back injury and was in between surgeries, and my mom had asked if I could come to Boston to hang out with him while she was out of town. He wasn’t fully bedridden or anything; mostly, he could just use some help passing the timeless time. Our phone calls made clear he was restless and depressed, but it wasn’t until I saw him in person that it hit me just how isolated he was. Mostly because of how intimate he’d become with various television shows, particularly “Kathy Griffin: My Life on the D-List.”
“I just don’t understand why she didn’t get a flat-screen for the master bedroom,” he said, brow furrowed in genuine bewilderment. “She said she wanted sleek and sexy — but then she goes and gets a rise-up TV?”
I felt compelled to respond even though he wasn’t really talking to me. “Yeah ... I don’t know.”
“I bet Mike talked her into it.” Then, he shook his head ruefully. “Like that guy even has any credentials!”
•
I hadn’t wanted to go. It had been years since my dad and I had hung out, just us two. I worried about what it would be like without the noise of other family around.
The thing is, when I was a teenager, my dad and I had been good buddies. I was him, everyone said. A mini-him. I was into the things that mattered to him: politics, debate, all that. Back then it really looked as though I was becoming a chip off the old block.
Gradually, though, it stopped being that way. During my 20s there were endless fights, fights that were truly harrowing and unnerving, like the one that exploded the day before my wedding. The topic — would we or would we not perform our father-daughter dance to the hideous “Can You Feel the Love Tonight?” — was silly. But the battle itself was disconcertingly stormy and thoughts of it still make my stomach churn.
These days, though, there’s quiet. And distance. There’s the fact that I live 3,000 miles away. But there’s also that I no longer have his name, I no longer lead a life that resembles his in any discernible way. I knew we loved each other, but there was the distinct possibility that a visit would reveal we didn’t actually like each other much at all.
Yet the weekend came and I found myself there.
“I’m glad to see you,” he said when I arrived. It was the wee hours and he’d shuffled out of bed to greet me, his eyes at half-mast, shoulders slightly hunched. He looked older, I thought. He apologized for needing to head back to bed, but, actually, I was relieved to be left alone.
•
The next day in the TV room, I got a taste of how slowly time passed there. After hours that felt like days, I needed a change of scenery, so I went to the kitchen and embarked on a wildly invigorating cleaning spree. My dad kept me company while I O.C.D.’ed out.
I flat-out adore cleaning, but my parents’ kitchen, loaded with random, useless stuff, was a bit of an adventure. Only once I was done purging things — like year-old Jordan almonds, mildew-y tennis headbands, a sandwich baggie of broken coffee mug — could the actual scrubbing begin in earnest. And that day, amid the counter fray: croutons. Picture a small, clear plastic tub containing maybe five stale-looking croutons. The kind that come with a Caesar salad from a pizza place but that no one on earth has ever actually eaten.
I waved the croutons at my dad as I went to the trash. “I’m throwing these away, O.K.?”
Since it wasn’t really a question, I was surprised when he stopped me.
“Wait,” he said. “Don’t.”
I eyed him quizzically.
“Well,” he said, the tiniest shade of sheepishness creeping into his voice. “What if someone maybe needs them?”
Right. What if someone maybe needs them. Like, down the line. That’s perfect.
•
My parents cannot throw anything away. At the point at which the average person will dispose of an item, my parents will just move it — to the basement, to the attic or simply off to the side. “Go ahead, laugh,” my mom’s always saying. “You don’t know what might come in handy later.”
But personally I don’t see how a papier-mâché head could come in handy later. Or a tower of browning New Yorker magazines. Or a bowl full of keys to nothing, an IV contraption from when the cat had a urinary tract infection or a shiny plastic top hat emblazoned with “Happy New Year! Y2K, you’re O.K.!”
Or croutons.
Me, I’m intensely clutter-averse. I know I get rid of items prematurely, but the pleasure I derive from throwing a thing away probably outweighs the pleasure I’d derive from using that thing down the line. I even like throwing files away on my computer because of that intoxicating sound the trash folder makes.
•
So there I was in my parents’ kitchen, sponge in one hand, croutons in the other, just standing there with my skinny-legged, reality-television-obsessed dad. And suddenly this rumbling laugh bubbled up from deep inside me and once it started it would not stop. My dad joined in, giggling at first, then erupting into his full-blown sputtering/snorting combo and together we just stood there, doubled over and howling for I don’t know how long. Both of us kept trying to speak, but the only word that managed to squeak its way out was “croutons.”
For the next three days, we spent most of our hours back in the TV room. In between shows, and over shows, we talked. There was, of course, lots of discussion about Kathy Griffin (Me: “Maybe she should think about getting an agent who doesn’t avoid her calls?”), but we also covered topics from peacoats (concurring on their classic cuteness) and manicures (life-enhancing and a helpful deterrent for us nail-biters). I walked him through a day in my life in Los Angeles, and at one point found myself talking about how I want to be a writer. Whenever we got hungry I’d heat up food the neighbors brought over, which we’d eat on those tremendously exciting little TV trays.
My dad kept apologizing for being laid-up and unfun. I told him it was O.K., because it was. Anyway, it was possible I was having fun. I guess I must’ve been since I was forgetting to be nervous.
On the day I was leaving, I opened my makeup case to find — nestled innocently inside — the tub of croutons. I screeched with delight and could hear my dad giggling from the TV room. That night, before heading out to the taxi, I put the croutons in his medicine cabinet. Right between the Tinactin and the Ban unscented roll-on.
In the year since, the croutons have seen a lot of action, volleying between the East and West Coasts, hiding, then re-appearing in delightfully cunning places. The U.P.S. delivery was one of my dad’s craftier moves, but it wasn’t half as good as the time I brought the croutons to my cousin’s wedding in Chicago and, in an electrifying coup, had one of the waiters serve the croutons to my dad beside his salad. Right now that little plastic tub is back in Dad’s possession, but I’m pretty sure I’m onto his game plan: he’s having the croutons lay low in the hopes that I’ll forget about them. He thinks he can catch me off guard and fully blow my mind with the next Crouton Appearance.
And to that I say: bring it on.
Monday, June 9, 2008
Op-Ed: Salmon
Hi Guys,
Please help critique the final work that comes in.
Here's the next article. Size is 5 x 4.55. B&W.
Sardines With Your Bagel?
By TARAS GRESCOE
THE first chinook salmon from Alaska’s Copper River arrived in Seattle last month, for shipment to fish counters throughout the country. With the commercial chinook season in California and most of Oregon canceled for the first time in 160 years, Alaska chinook were going for record prices: $40 a pound for fillet.
There was a time that the thought of a good salmon meal would leave me feeling faint with desire. Just imagining a toasted bagel papered with near-translucent slices of lox, a roll of vinegared rice stuffed with crispy salmon skin or a thick steak of lightly grilled chinook would have me searching for the nearest deli, sushi bar or bistro.
It was an impulse I never hesitated to indulge. Salmon — so low in saturated fats, so high in brain-protective omega-3 fatty acids — was that rarest of commodities: a guilt-free, heart-healthy self-indulgence, and one of the cleanest forms of protein around.
Not any more. Wild Atlantic salmon are commercially extinct, and runs of Pacific salmon south of the Alaska panhandle are experiencing catastrophic collapses. This year, for the sake of the remaining wild salmon on the West Coast, as well as my own health, I’m changing my diet. Whether it’s wild or farmed, I’m swearing off salmon.
It’s not a decision I make lightly. I grew up eating wild salmon. As a boy, I was given my first chunk of maple-smoked salmon at a dude ranch in northern British Columbia by a crusty old lawyer from Tennessee named Lucius Burch (“better than candy,” he cackled — and it was). Wild salmon is my madeleine: it is the taste of my childhood.
Until recently, it was something for which I was willing to pay a premium. But with so many fisheries closed this year, I can no longer afford to splurge on sustainably fished salmon. It’s just too scarce and too expensive.
What happened to the mighty chinook of the Pacific Northwest? Regional fisheries officials have blamed ocean conditions for a temporary decline in the plankton and small fish that juvenile salmon feed on. But most of the problem is man-made.
Spawning salmon need gravel streambeds and cold, fast-running water to lay their eggs. Giant pumps have been piping water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta to towns and farms in California’s Central Valley, degrading river habitat and even sucking up young fish before they reach the sea. Farther north, dams on the Snake River have prevented egg-bearing fish from reaching streambeds inland.
Overfishing is also a factor; too many nets have been scooping up too many fish for too long. What’s more, higher water temperatures brought on by global warming prevent the eggs of spawning females from maturing. It’s not surprising that the only consistently healthy salmon runs left are those in the cold waters of Alaska.
The fact that salmon is still available in supermarkets, and is cheaper than it ever was, is no comfort. Ninety percent of the fresh salmon consumed in the United States is from farms, and I have come to believe that the farmed product is not a healthy alternative to wild.
Three Norwegian-owned companies dominate the salmon-farming industry in North America, and their offshore net-cages dot long stretches of the west coast of the Americas. In Chile, overcrowding in these oceanic feedlots led to this year’s epidemic of infectious salmon anemia, a disease that has killed millions of fish and left the flesh of survivors riddled with lesions.
The situation in Canada, which supplies the United States with 40 percent of its farmed salmon, is not much better. In British Columbia, offshore net-cages are breeding grounds for thumbtack-sized parasites called sea lice. In the Broughton Archipelago, a jigsaw of islands off the province’s central coast, wild pink salmon are infested with the crustaceans. Scientists think that the tens of millions of salmon in Broughton’s 27 Norwegian-owned farms are attracting sea lice and passing them on to wild fish, killing them. They say that this infestation could drive Broughton’s pink salmon to extinction by 2011.
Please help critique the final work that comes in.
Here's the next article. Size is 5 x 4.55. B&W.
Sardines With Your Bagel?
By TARAS GRESCOE
THE first chinook salmon from Alaska’s Copper River arrived in Seattle last month, for shipment to fish counters throughout the country. With the commercial chinook season in California and most of Oregon canceled for the first time in 160 years, Alaska chinook were going for record prices: $40 a pound for fillet.
There was a time that the thought of a good salmon meal would leave me feeling faint with desire. Just imagining a toasted bagel papered with near-translucent slices of lox, a roll of vinegared rice stuffed with crispy salmon skin or a thick steak of lightly grilled chinook would have me searching for the nearest deli, sushi bar or bistro.
It was an impulse I never hesitated to indulge. Salmon — so low in saturated fats, so high in brain-protective omega-3 fatty acids — was that rarest of commodities: a guilt-free, heart-healthy self-indulgence, and one of the cleanest forms of protein around.
Not any more. Wild Atlantic salmon are commercially extinct, and runs of Pacific salmon south of the Alaska panhandle are experiencing catastrophic collapses. This year, for the sake of the remaining wild salmon on the West Coast, as well as my own health, I’m changing my diet. Whether it’s wild or farmed, I’m swearing off salmon.
It’s not a decision I make lightly. I grew up eating wild salmon. As a boy, I was given my first chunk of maple-smoked salmon at a dude ranch in northern British Columbia by a crusty old lawyer from Tennessee named Lucius Burch (“better than candy,” he cackled — and it was). Wild salmon is my madeleine: it is the taste of my childhood.
Until recently, it was something for which I was willing to pay a premium. But with so many fisheries closed this year, I can no longer afford to splurge on sustainably fished salmon. It’s just too scarce and too expensive.
What happened to the mighty chinook of the Pacific Northwest? Regional fisheries officials have blamed ocean conditions for a temporary decline in the plankton and small fish that juvenile salmon feed on. But most of the problem is man-made.
Spawning salmon need gravel streambeds and cold, fast-running water to lay their eggs. Giant pumps have been piping water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta to towns and farms in California’s Central Valley, degrading river habitat and even sucking up young fish before they reach the sea. Farther north, dams on the Snake River have prevented egg-bearing fish from reaching streambeds inland.
Overfishing is also a factor; too many nets have been scooping up too many fish for too long. What’s more, higher water temperatures brought on by global warming prevent the eggs of spawning females from maturing. It’s not surprising that the only consistently healthy salmon runs left are those in the cold waters of Alaska.
The fact that salmon is still available in supermarkets, and is cheaper than it ever was, is no comfort. Ninety percent of the fresh salmon consumed in the United States is from farms, and I have come to believe that the farmed product is not a healthy alternative to wild.
Three Norwegian-owned companies dominate the salmon-farming industry in North America, and their offshore net-cages dot long stretches of the west coast of the Americas. In Chile, overcrowding in these oceanic feedlots led to this year’s epidemic of infectious salmon anemia, a disease that has killed millions of fish and left the flesh of survivors riddled with lesions.
The situation in Canada, which supplies the United States with 40 percent of its farmed salmon, is not much better. In British Columbia, offshore net-cages are breeding grounds for thumbtack-sized parasites called sea lice. In the Broughton Archipelago, a jigsaw of islands off the province’s central coast, wild pink salmon are infested with the crustaceans. Scientists think that the tens of millions of salmon in Broughton’s 27 Norwegian-owned farms are attracting sea lice and passing them on to wild fish, killing them. They say that this infestation could drive Broughton’s pink salmon to extinction by 2011.
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