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Revolutionary Ideas<br />
PLUS:<br />
SIX VISIONARIES<br />
PROVING IT'S NEVER<br />
TOO LATE TO MAKE<br />
A DIFFERENCE.<br />
P.42<br />
STORIES<br />
THAT MATTER<br />
MAY/JUNE <strong>2017</strong><br />
PSMAG.COM<br />
• • •<br />
REVISING<br />
THE<br />
BIBLE<br />
P.54<br />
RETURNING<br />
ANIMALS<br />
TO NATIVE<br />
AMERICAN<br />
LAND<br />
P.22<br />
THIS<br />
YEAR'S<br />
MOST<br />
EXCITING<br />
YOUNG<br />
MINDS<br />
AND:<br />
THE MYTH<br />
OF ENDLESS<br />
GROWTH<br />
WHAT<br />
ECONOMISTS<br />
GET WRONG<br />
ABOUT THE<br />
FUTURE. P.46<br />
0 74470 26607 5<br />
VOL.10 • NO.03<br />
06<br />
$5.99 U.S. / $6.99 CA
VOLUME 10, NUMBER 03<br />
THE IDEA THAT ECONOMIC<br />
GROWTH CAN CONTINUE FOREVER ON A<br />
FINITE PLANET IS THE UNIFYING FAITH OF<br />
INDUSTRIAL CIVILIZATION. P.46<br />
Photo by Alejandro Durán<br />
AMANECER, 2011
PROUD<br />
RECIPIENTS<br />
OF THE<br />
<strong>2017</strong><br />
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CONTENTS<br />
FEATURES MAY/JUNE <strong>2017</strong><br />
VOLUME 10, NUMBER 03<br />
29<br />
REVOLUTIONS HIDING<br />
IN PLAIN SIGHT<br />
You can find a radical<br />
history in even the most<br />
commonplace object. Here<br />
are four everyday things<br />
that represent a turn in the<br />
way we live.<br />
By Malcolm Harris<br />
34<br />
42<br />
46<br />
54<br />
THE 30 TOP THINKERS<br />
UNDER 30<br />
This year’s most exciting<br />
young thinkers and<br />
advocates in policy and<br />
social justice.<br />
By Avital Andrews<br />
& Rosie Spinks<br />
CHANGING THE WORLD<br />
AFTER 80<br />
These visionaries did some<br />
of their most important<br />
work after retirement—<br />
proving that you’re<br />
never too old to make a<br />
difference.<br />
By Avital Andrews<br />
THE FALLACY OF ENDLESS<br />
GROWTH<br />
What economists get wrong<br />
about the future.<br />
By Christopher Ketcham<br />
REVISING THE BIBLE<br />
Evolutionary biology meets<br />
Adam and Eve in the<br />
archives.<br />
By Ginger Strand<br />
PHOTO BY JARREN VINK<br />
MAY/JUNE <strong>2017</strong> • PSMAG.COM 3
Because we need<br />
Robert’s<br />
more places where<br />
we can dream<br />
We all need places to get outside—to explore, exercise, and recharge. But with America’s<br />
open spaces disappearing at a rate of 6,000 acres each day, we’re at risk of losing our<br />
most cherished outdoor escapes. Together, we can change that. Join The Trust for Public<br />
Land to save the lands we all love—from urban parks to vast wilderness. Since 1972, we’ve<br />
worked with communities to protect more than 3 million acres and create more than<br />
5,000 parks and natural places for people to enjoy. Help to keep this land our land.<br />
Share why nature matters to you: tpl.org/ourland #ourland<br />
THE<br />
TRUST<br />
FOR<br />
PUBLIC<br />
LAND
CONTENTS<br />
DEPARTMENTS MAY/JUNE <strong>2017</strong><br />
VOLUME 10, NUMBER 03<br />
PRIMER<br />
14<br />
THE FIX<br />
KNOW IT ALL BY MILKOS; FIELD NOTES BY TOMAS VAN HOUTRYVE/VII/REDUX; CULTURE FEATURES BY JERRY RILEY<br />
06 LETTER FROM<br />
THE EDITOR<br />
The<br />
Counterrevolution<br />
07 THE<br />
CONVERSATION<br />
09 SINCE WE<br />
LAST SPOKE<br />
11 THE SMALL STUFF<br />
14 KNOW IT ALL<br />
‘Superfoods’ Are<br />
Never Super<br />
FIELD NOTES<br />
16 JHARIA, INDIA<br />
17 MARCH OF THE<br />
REFUGEES<br />
18 FREEDOM SQUARE<br />
19 GOSEONG, SOUTH<br />
KOREA<br />
20 LIRA, UGANDA<br />
20 DELICATE ARCH<br />
ON THE COVER<br />
Illustration by Jenue<br />
60<br />
19<br />
22 LEADING THE<br />
WAY IN WILDLIFE<br />
RESTORATION<br />
Native American<br />
nations like the<br />
Colville confederacy<br />
are flexing their<br />
treaty rights by<br />
reintroducing key<br />
species to the<br />
landscape.<br />
25 AMERICA’S<br />
FAVORITE GUN<br />
RESEARCHER<br />
John Lott is a oneman<br />
pro-gun<br />
research machine.<br />
The problem? Many<br />
of his peers have<br />
major misgivings<br />
about his methods.<br />
THE CULTURE PAGES<br />
60 CULTURE FEATURES<br />
A Library as Large as<br />
Africa<br />
62 PACIFIC<br />
STANDARD PICKS<br />
Twitter and Tear Gas<br />
63 SCENES<br />
The Refugees’<br />
Theater<br />
64 SCENES<br />
Standing Up for<br />
Transgender<br />
Acceptance<br />
65 GUEST<br />
PROGRAMMER<br />
Anita Kunz<br />
66 SHELF HELP<br />
The Boy Who Loved<br />
Too Much<br />
66 BOOK REVIEW<br />
Divided by Design<br />
67 SHELF HELP<br />
Islamophobia and<br />
Racism in America<br />
68 ONE LAST THING<br />
Party Plates<br />
MAY/JUNE <strong>2017</strong> • PSMAG.COM 5
Ahead of a special photo<br />
issue coming in July, <strong>Pacific</strong><br />
<strong>Standard</strong> was honored with<br />
the National Magazine<br />
Award for Feature<br />
Photography in February.<br />
LETTER FROM THE EDITOR<br />
The Counterrevolution<br />
Our current president was elected to office on the promise that he would<br />
bring jobs back to America—that he alone could grow the economy in ways<br />
previously unseen. Donald Trump’s economic plan calls for creating 25<br />
million new jobs over the next decade. That’s a vision we can all get behind—and<br />
many did back in November—but can he pull it off? Can anyone?<br />
In the early 1970s, a group of environmental scientists at the Massachusetts<br />
Institute of Technology used a giant mainframe computer to generate several<br />
future scenarios for population and economic growth around the world given<br />
existing resources. Their report, The Limits to Growth, was a clarion call for<br />
humanity to recognize the inevitable limits imposed by a finite planet. Nevertheless,<br />
in the 40-plus years since it was published, politicians have clung<br />
to an ideology that has been illogical from the start: that endless economic<br />
growth is not only possible but is the highest achievement for human society.<br />
In this issue, Christopher Ketcham looks back at the legacy of The Limits<br />
to Growth and considers why we still believe the myth. That essay anchors a<br />
series of feature stories built around the theme of revolutionary ideas—an<br />
expansion of our annual 30 under 30 franchise, which is packed with bright<br />
young minds with some big ideas of their own. This year’s selection includes<br />
a physics prodigy and autism advocate; a behavioral economist at Facebook;<br />
several innovative advocates for veterans; and a handful of inventors.<br />
The architect of our list since its inception, Avital Andrews, says that she’s<br />
often asked if narrowing down the field of candidates we receive each year is<br />
a depressing task. “They mean, I think, that it must be disheartening to focus<br />
on people who have accomplished so much so young, while we common older<br />
folk (I am, let’s say, past 30) live our commoner, older lives,” she explains.<br />
But, in fact, she feels the opposite. “It’s inspiring,” Andrews<br />
writes in the introduction to our 12-page package, which this<br />
year also includes a series of miniature profiles of inspiring folks<br />
on the other end of the age spectrum (Trump didn’t make the<br />
cut). “It gives me faith for the future. Rather than be intimidated<br />
by the 30 up-and-comers on <strong>Pacific</strong> <strong>Standard</strong>’s <strong>2017</strong> list, we<br />
should take their existence as<br />
a needed sign that everything<br />
might, after all, turn out OK.”<br />
In an age when political<br />
logic has seemingly vanished,<br />
I find this reminder<br />
more vital than ever.<br />
Nichola ackson<br />
Editor-in-Chief<br />
Seven<br />
Things You<br />
Would Have<br />
Learned If<br />
You Read<br />
PSmag.com<br />
1<br />
Congress has<br />
disciplined 20<br />
lawmakers since<br />
the Office of<br />
Congressional<br />
Ethics’ inception<br />
in 2008.<br />
2<br />
Marijuana<br />
growers account<br />
for 1 percent of<br />
electricity use<br />
in the United<br />
States.<br />
3<br />
More than 70<br />
rural American<br />
hospitals<br />
have closed in<br />
the past six<br />
years.<br />
4<br />
There are just<br />
eight fulltime<br />
librarians<br />
working in the<br />
School District<br />
of Philadelphia.<br />
5<br />
There is a<br />
correlation<br />
between an<br />
NFL player’s<br />
penalties and his<br />
arrest record.<br />
6<br />
Autism was<br />
first described<br />
in the 1940s by<br />
an Austrian-<br />
American<br />
psychiatrist.<br />
7<br />
One hundred<br />
and eighty-five<br />
environmental<br />
activists were<br />
murdered in<br />
2015 alone.<br />
6 MAY/JUNE <strong>2017</strong> • PSMAG.COM
PRIMER<br />
THE CONVERSATION<br />
TALK TO US LETTERS@PSMAG.COM<br />
Racism in the<br />
Diamond Mine<br />
(JANUARY/FEBRUARY <strong>2017</strong>)<br />
Although the author, Will<br />
McGrath, does not mention<br />
Letšeng Diamond Mine<br />
by name, the description<br />
clearly refers to the Letšeng<br />
Diamond Mine. It is therefore<br />
important to state<br />
unequivocally that racism<br />
of any kind has never been,<br />
and will never be, tolerated<br />
at the Letšeng mine.<br />
The management of<br />
Letšeng Diamond Mine is<br />
committed to transparency<br />
in all aspects of its operations,<br />
and regularly hosts<br />
journalists at the mine. It<br />
is therefore disappointing<br />
that McGrath did not make<br />
contact with the company,<br />
and therefore afford the<br />
Letšeng mine the opportunity<br />
to emphasize that racism<br />
has no place at Letšeng.<br />
As a locally registered<br />
business entity, the company<br />
is subject to the laws<br />
of Lesotho, including the<br />
Constitution, which, under<br />
Section 18, unequivocally<br />
guarantees freedom from<br />
discrimination based on<br />
race. This is at the core of<br />
the company’s policies.<br />
The company’s policies,<br />
regulations, and programs<br />
further reflect its policy of<br />
zero tolerance of racism,<br />
where all employees are<br />
treated equally irrespective<br />
of diversity of thoughts,<br />
ideas, beliefs, race, color, sex,<br />
language, national origin,<br />
religion, orientation, or age.<br />
All employees’ concerns are<br />
heard and necessary actions<br />
are taken, with regular feedback<br />
given to employees.<br />
—LETŠENG DIAMONDS<br />
MANAGEMENT<br />
On the Milo Bus<br />
With the Lost Boys of<br />
America’s New Right<br />
(PSMAG.COM, FEBRUARY 21)<br />
[Milo] Yiannopoulos wasn’t<br />
just talking about “consenting<br />
relationships between<br />
adult men where there’s a<br />
large age gap.” Yiannopoulos<br />
was talking about relationships<br />
between young men—<br />
teenage boys above the age<br />
of consent—and older adult<br />
gay men. But he also said<br />
this: “We’re talking about<br />
13-25, 13-28—these things<br />
do happen perfectly consensually.”<br />
Challenged on<br />
another point, Yiannopoulos<br />
described 13-year-olds<br />
as “sexually mature” (has<br />
he ever met a 13-year-old?)<br />
Our Favorite<br />
Tweet<br />
@jk_rowling:<br />
This is so beautiful,<br />
it made me cry.<br />
@Lollardfish: On<br />
Down syndrome<br />
& stories: “’Twas<br />
the night before<br />
the night before<br />
Christmas, and<br />
Harry Potter was<br />
in trouble.” [“Down<br />
Syndrome and the<br />
Stories We Tell,”<br />
PSmag.com]<br />
•••<br />
PS Sighting<br />
This is the second<br />
National Magazine<br />
Award for <strong>Pacific</strong><br />
<strong>Standard</strong>.<br />
•••<br />
Update<br />
Our story “A New<br />
Normal” (March/<br />
April <strong>2017</strong>) stated<br />
that the psychiatrist<br />
Darin Dougherty,<br />
the neurosurgeon<br />
Emad Eskandar, and<br />
the neuroengineer<br />
Alik Widge designed<br />
and surgically<br />
implanted Liss<br />
Murphy’s deep-brain<br />
stimulation device.<br />
Only Dougherty<br />
and Eskandar<br />
participated, and<br />
while they designed<br />
Murphy’s clinical trial,<br />
they did not design<br />
the device itself. We<br />
regret the error.<br />
and clearly suggested that<br />
13-year-olds were capable of<br />
consenting to sexual contact<br />
with adults. And, of course,<br />
Yiannopoulos crudely/jokingly<br />
expressed his gratitude<br />
to the priest he says molested<br />
him when he was 14.<br />
But I gotta say ... many gay<br />
men had relationships when<br />
they were first coming out<br />
with older gay men. These<br />
relationships can be “a real<br />
and meaningful part of [early]<br />
romantic experience,”<br />
per [author Laurie] Penny,<br />
“[and they] can help a young<br />
gay man escape from a lack<br />
of support or understanding<br />
at home,” per Yiannopoulos.<br />
(They can also be abusive or<br />
exploitative nightmares—<br />
but so too can early romantic<br />
relationships with “ageappropriate”<br />
partners. High<br />
school sweethearts can also<br />
be abusers.)<br />
So look, straight people,<br />
if you don’t want gay<br />
teenagers above the age<br />
of consent entering into<br />
sexual relationships [with]<br />
older gay men—if you don’t<br />
want your gay sons pursuing<br />
older gay men and viceversa—do<br />
what you can<br />
to make it safe for your<br />
gay teenagers to come out<br />
and date each other. Be<br />
just as supportive, proud,<br />
affirming, and meddlesome<br />
when your gay teen starts to<br />
date as you are when your<br />
straight teens start to date.<br />
—DAN SAVAGE<br />
On the one hand: This<br />
doesn’t make them look<br />
good. On the other hand:<br />
This is yet another in a long<br />
line of articles that depict<br />
Milo and his followers as<br />
pitiable and sad and deserving<br />
of empathy while spending<br />
no time to focus on the<br />
real human damage they<br />
have done over the years.<br />
—NOTMYBESTPLAN<br />
ILLUSTRATION BY JUNGYEON ROH<br />
MAY/JUNE <strong>2017</strong> • PSMAG.COM 7
PRIMER<br />
SINCE WE LAST SPOKE<br />
NEW TWISTS ON PAST STORIES<br />
PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY TAYLOR LE<br />
Streaming for Justice<br />
In a 2016 interview with Kathleen Sharp, the<br />
director Ava DuVernay argued that, “if some<br />
people are rendered as caricatures or as less<br />
than human [in film], that … impacts policy<br />
and politics, culture.” In late January the Academy<br />
Awards recognized the Selma director’s<br />
ability to leave a more positive impression on<br />
culture, announcing that her latest movie, the<br />
criminal justice documentary 13th, was one of<br />
five films nominated for best documentary. In<br />
a recent interview with Oprah Winfrey, DuVernay<br />
emphasized the film’s rare success—she<br />
says it’s her most widely distributed—as<br />
a result of its availability<br />
for streaming on Netflix, a<br />
crucial equalizer for diverse<br />
filmmakers: “For this film<br />
to be so widely available in<br />
190 countries, I didn’t understand<br />
what the power of<br />
that would be. My Twitter<br />
timeline is in shambles.”<br />
Second Wind<br />
There are few places on<br />
Earth as windy as the billionaire<br />
Philip Anschutz’s<br />
ranch in Wyoming. That’s<br />
why, Gabriel Kahn reported<br />
in <strong>Pacific</strong> <strong>Standard</strong> in 2015,<br />
the magnate decided years<br />
ago to build a wind farm on<br />
site, along with an interstate<br />
power line to carry its bounty<br />
to California—where laws<br />
mandate that a third of the<br />
state’s electricity must come<br />
from renewable sources by<br />
2020. Kahn chronicled the<br />
regulatory quagmire that<br />
has kept the project in the<br />
planning stages, from conservation<br />
rules for native<br />
species to the construction<br />
of the power line itself. “One<br />
of the last power lines of this<br />
magnitude to be built in the<br />
United States,” Kahn wrote,<br />
“the <strong>Pacific</strong> Intertie, from<br />
Oregon to Southern California<br />
(completed in 1970),<br />
required a presidential decree.”<br />
In December, though,<br />
Secretary of the Interior<br />
Sally Jewell announced the<br />
approval of an Anschutz-financed<br />
green-energy power<br />
line that will stretch more<br />
than 700 miles. For Anschutz’s<br />
Power Company of<br />
Wyoming—which will send<br />
3,000 megawatts through<br />
the line from his Wyoming<br />
ranch—the approval is a<br />
long time coming.<br />
Bailed Out<br />
In 2015, Maura Ewing wrote<br />
about the Bronx Freedom<br />
Fund, a charitable bond fund<br />
that helps low-income people<br />
make bail. The bail fund<br />
model has been replicated<br />
in Massachusetts, Connecticut,<br />
Brooklyn, and Nashville,<br />
and funds targeting specific<br />
groups have cropped up<br />
elsewhere. (In Baltimore,<br />
for example, one group posts<br />
bail for those arrested while<br />
protesting violence.) Some<br />
legal observers think the<br />
rise of community groups<br />
using donations to post bail<br />
for strangers who can’t do so<br />
themselves has the potential<br />
to upend the criminal justice<br />
system, but the State of New<br />
Jersey has decided to take<br />
matters into its own hands:<br />
In January, a near-complete<br />
elimination of the cash bail<br />
system went into effect<br />
thanks to a constitutional<br />
amendment approved by<br />
voters in 2014. Judges still<br />
have the power to impose<br />
bail, though the New York<br />
Times reported that judges<br />
set bail just three times in<br />
the 3,382 cases statewide<br />
that were processed in the<br />
first four weeks after the<br />
amendment took effect.<br />
MAY/JUNE <strong>2017</strong> • PSMAG.COM 9
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PRIMER<br />
THE SMALL STUFF<br />
NEWS & NOTES ON HUMAN BEHAVIOR<br />
THERE’S A NAME FOR THAT<br />
INVISIBILITYCLOAKILLUSION<br />
WE ALL KNOW what it’s like to feel we’re being watched. Teenagers are particularly<br />
familiar with the discomfiting sense that everyone around them is scrutinizing<br />
their risky new haircuts, cool new shoes, or grease-stained T-shirts. Bad news,<br />
youth of the world: According to a recent series of studies, we’re being watched<br />
even more than we think.<br />
Researchers from Yale University surveyed students exiting a dining hall. Respondents<br />
reliably felt that they’d observed their fellow diners (strangers and<br />
friends alike) more than their fellow diners had observed them. Of course, it’s a<br />
mathematical impossibility that every student was more socially observant than<br />
average. But that’s how most of them felt. Students in another dining-room survey<br />
were more likely to interpret instances of eye contact as moments when they’d<br />
been caught looking—not when they’d caught someone else doing the same. And,<br />
in a related study, students fell wildly short in estimating how much another student<br />
had observed about them in a waiting-room interaction.<br />
The study’s authors took these results as evidence of an “invisibility cloak illusion.”<br />
Stuck inside our heads, we all know how much we’re watching others, but fail to grasp<br />
just how much everyone else is watching us—in part, the researchers speculated, because<br />
this ignorance makes us feel secure. “To the extent knowledge is power,” they<br />
wrote, “we should feel more powerful if we believe we are observing others more, and<br />
so have more knowledge of them, than they do of us.” We often conceal our information-gathering<br />
by averting our gazes when caught. After all, no one wants to be the<br />
nosy gawker at a party. It turns out, though, that most of us probably are.<br />
—PETER C. BAKER<br />
ILLUSTRATION BY MATT CHASE<br />
QUICK STUDY<br />
A Virtual<br />
Escape<br />
From<br />
Chronic Pain<br />
If you suffer from chronic<br />
pain, you’ve probably<br />
wished you could enter an<br />
alternate universe. Now,<br />
thanks to virtual-reality<br />
technology, you can, at least<br />
temporarily—and the result<br />
is an enormous reduction<br />
in physical suffering. That’s<br />
the finding of a study published<br />
in the online journal<br />
PLoS One that featured 30<br />
participants with various<br />
medical conditions causing<br />
chronic pain, most involving<br />
the spine or hips. Using<br />
an Oculus Rift headset, all<br />
spent five minutes exploring<br />
a 360-degree fantasy landscape<br />
with “trees, hills, snow<br />
scenes, caves, flames and<br />
otters.” On average, their<br />
pain level dropped by 60<br />
percent while in this virtual<br />
world. When they returned<br />
to the real world, it was still<br />
down by 33 percent—a reduction<br />
roughly equivalent<br />
to a dose of morphine. While<br />
it’s not clear how long this<br />
effect lasts, the team argues<br />
a combination of pleasant<br />
distraction and, perhaps, the<br />
release of endorphins makes<br />
virtual reality a promising,<br />
drug-free way to alleviate<br />
pain that just won’t quit.<br />
—TOM JACOBS<br />
MAY/JUNE <strong>2017</strong> • PSMAG.COM 11
PRIMER<br />
THE SMALL STUFF<br />
NEWS & NOTES ON HUMAN BEHAVIOR<br />
RESEARCH GONE WILD<br />
POWER<br />
POSEUR<br />
•What the Media Says<br />
In December, Elite Daily<br />
touted “seven ways<br />
power poses can improve<br />
your health and your<br />
work life,” citing a 2012<br />
TED Talk given by the<br />
Harvard University social<br />
psychologist Amy Cuddy.<br />
The article reached<br />
millions of readers online;<br />
Good magazine followed<br />
—STEVE PASIERB, president of the Toy Industry Association, in his year-end<br />
letter to members about an import-tax code change proposed in the House of<br />
Representatives. More than 96 percent of American toy spending went to imports for<br />
the past seven years, IBISWorld estimates. Roughly 95 percent of Hasbro products<br />
and 100 percent of Mattel’s are made overseas, according to a toy-industry analysis<br />
by Wells Fargo. The original 1959 Barbie doll was stamped “Made in Japan.”<br />
ILLUSTRATION BY MATT CHASE<br />
up in January with a<br />
breathless post about<br />
Cuddy’s “secret to selfconfidence.”<br />
This is just<br />
the latest exposure for<br />
power posing, which has<br />
garnered attention from<br />
outlets like the New York<br />
Times and the Washington<br />
Post, as well as television<br />
shows like Brooklyn 99.<br />
•What the Research<br />
Found<br />
Cuddy based her talk<br />
on studies of mock<br />
interviews. In one<br />
example, 66 Columbia<br />
University students were<br />
told to maintain either<br />
“high-power” (expansive,<br />
open)—à la Wonder<br />
Wom<br />
man—or “low-power”<br />
(hunched over, closed)<br />
postures for several<br />
minutes while preparing<br />
aspeech about their<br />
qualifiications for their<br />
dream<br />
jobs, which they<br />
then presented to two<br />
hiring<br />
professionals. As<br />
Cuddy and her team<br />
predicted, participants<br />
who struck high-power<br />
posess “performed better<br />
and were more likely<br />
to<br />
be chosen for hire.”<br />
•What the Media Missed<br />
In 2015, a team led by<br />
University of Zurich<br />
researcher Eva Ranehill<br />
attempted to replicate<br />
Cuddy’s study with<br />
a greater number of<br />
participants. They found<br />
that, while test subjects<br />
said they felt more<br />
powerful after posing,<br />
there were no significant<br />
changes in their behavior.<br />
A year later, University of<br />
Pennsylvania researchers<br />
studied the effects of<br />
power posing after a<br />
tug-of-war competition.<br />
Among both winners and<br />
losers, high-power poses<br />
had little to no effect on<br />
feelings of power, raising<br />
doubts about Cuddy’s<br />
notion that posture<br />
can help you “fake it till<br />
you become it.” One of<br />
Cuddy’s co-authors even<br />
posted on her faculty<br />
page: “I do not believe<br />
that ‘power pose’ effects<br />
are real.” Throughout it all,<br />
Cuddy has stood behind<br />
her research. So, strike<br />
poses if you like—but<br />
know the jury is still out<br />
on their tangible effects.<br />
—SARAH WITMAN<br />
OVERHEARD<br />
NO ONE WANTS<br />
TO HAVE TO<br />
EXPLAIN TO THEIR<br />
CHILDREN WHY<br />
SANTA WAS PUT<br />
OUT OF WORK.”<br />
QUICK STUDY<br />
Young Man,<br />
You Just<br />
Earned Yourself<br />
a Good<br />
Euphemism!<br />
Few parents would admit<br />
to beating their children.<br />
But what about spanking<br />
them? A study published<br />
in the journal Psychology<br />
of Violence finds parents<br />
were more comfortable<br />
with corporal punishment<br />
when gentler language was<br />
used to describe it. In an<br />
online survey, 672 adults<br />
were presented with a few<br />
brief vignettes about a<br />
mother paddling her fiveyear-old<br />
son, and asked<br />
how common, acceptable,<br />
and effective her action<br />
was. She scored highest on<br />
all three measures when<br />
her action was described as<br />
spanking and lowest when<br />
it was described as beating,<br />
with “swatting,” “hitting,”<br />
and “slapping” in between.<br />
Whatever you call it, research<br />
is clear that corporal<br />
punishment is both ineffective<br />
and psychologically<br />
harmful to children; the research<br />
team that authored<br />
the paper suggests “excising<br />
the term spank from<br />
our lexicon and replacing<br />
it with the word assault”<br />
could help change attitudes<br />
and behavior. Euphemisms<br />
can hurt—literally.<br />
—TOM JACOBS<br />
MAY/JUNE <strong>2017</strong> • PSMAG.COM 13
PRIMER<br />
KNOW IT ALL<br />
‘Superfoods’<br />
Aren’t That Super<br />
So why do we keep falling for them?<br />
BY MICHAEL FITZGERALD<br />
AMERICANS FALL hard for so-called superfoods. Sales keep<br />
skyrocketing for nutrient-dense fruits and vegetables like acai,<br />
pomegranate, beets, and goji berries. But most experts agree that<br />
the superfoods hype is more a result of marketing quackery than of<br />
healthy outcomes. Food isn’t medicine, and consumers shouldn’t<br />
expect any single food to cure what ails them—especially not<br />
the chronic ailments that many superfoods are purported to<br />
address. Three-quarters of Americans still won’t adopt<br />
the calorie-modest, balanced diet doctors have long<br />
recommended. Instead, we’re overinvesting billions<br />
on the food cure-all du jour. What<br />
keeps us reaching for the quick fix?<br />
PHOTOS BY ANDREY ANDREEV & MILKOS<br />
14 MAY/JUNE <strong>2017</strong> • PSMAG.COM
A COMPLETE GUIDE TO THE MOST IMPORTANT STORIES<br />
NATIONAL GOVERNMENTS<br />
HAVE SKIN IN THE GAME<br />
THE SCIENCE IS CONFUSING<br />
Countless diet books and<br />
headlines champion particular<br />
nutrients’ abilities to address<br />
specific health concerns. Coffee,<br />
dark chocolate, red wine—every<br />
day we hear about their high<br />
levels of vitamins that prevent<br />
cell damage. It’s true that, in<br />
recent years, nutrition science<br />
has become sophisticated<br />
enough to begin exploring how<br />
singular molecular components<br />
in food affect the body. But<br />
this research has not yet<br />
come close to fully capturing<br />
the relationship between<br />
diet, anatomy, lifestyle, and<br />
health outcomes. Take your<br />
antioxidant-stuffed produce<br />
drawer: A 2013 summary of<br />
decades of research from the<br />
National Institutes of Health<br />
found that, while “people<br />
who eat more vegetables<br />
and fruits have lower risks of<br />
several diseases … it is not<br />
clear whether these results<br />
are related to the amounts of<br />
antioxidants in vegetables and<br />
fruits … or to other lifestyle<br />
choices.” Around the same time,<br />
the Department of Agriculture<br />
closed down a database the<br />
organization had been using<br />
to promote high-antioxidant<br />
foods for years. Of course,<br />
that hasn’t stopped huckster<br />
dieticians, food marketers,<br />
and credulous journalists from<br />
spreading breathless claims on<br />
superfoods’ behalf.<br />
In the 1990s, Japan had a<br />
rice problem. Consumption<br />
of the grain, one of the<br />
country’s staple crops, was<br />
on the decline. In response,<br />
one rice-producing region<br />
near Tokyo tried a rebranding,<br />
investing in research on<br />
the health benefits of what<br />
they hoped would be more<br />
marketable: big-germ brown<br />
rice. Researchers found in biggerm<br />
high levels of the amino<br />
acid GABA, which purportedly<br />
accelerates brain metabolism,<br />
decreasing depression and<br />
headaches. In 2004, Japan<br />
presented these results to the<br />
United Nations, inspiring other<br />
countries, including South<br />
Korea, to make their own major<br />
investments in researching,<br />
growing, and marketing the<br />
“miracle rice.” Though the<br />
GABA claims don’t carry<br />
more weight than those about<br />
antioxidants, rice consumption<br />
soon ceased to decline in<br />
Japan, and diet gurus the<br />
world over now promote biggerm.<br />
Similar government-led<br />
development efforts involving<br />
loans, grants, and advertising<br />
have played a role in the rise<br />
of acai, pomegranate, and<br />
other homegrown superfood<br />
industries worldwide.<br />
MEANWHILE, THE FOOD<br />
POLICE ARE HANDCUFFED<br />
Food companies in the United<br />
States have always faced a<br />
major obstacle: full stomachs.<br />
The American population is<br />
only growing around 1 percent<br />
per year, while our physical<br />
capacity to consume food tops<br />
out at around 1,500 pounds<br />
of food per year. Yet our food<br />
supply provides nearly 4,000<br />
calories per day per capita,<br />
roughly twice the need of most<br />
people. How did the industry<br />
convince people to buy more<br />
than they needed? In her<br />
landmark 2003 book Food<br />
Politics: How the Food Industry<br />
Influences Nutrition & Health,<br />
the New York University<br />
nutritionist Marion Nestle<br />
meticulously documented<br />
how the food industry spent<br />
decades lobbying government<br />
agencies to loosen marketing<br />
laws. Legislation in the early<br />
1990s opened the doors for<br />
the overly optimistic nutritional<br />
claims that make food and<br />
supplements sound like<br />
medicine to consumers who<br />
are concerned about higher<br />
rates of chronic disease (and<br />
who have decreasing trust in<br />
the pharmaceutical industry).<br />
AND WE’RE SUCKERS FOR<br />
MISLEADING HEALTH CLAIMS<br />
IN FOOD ADVERTISEMENTS<br />
We are a society obsessed<br />
with the potential harmful<br />
effects of eating, according to<br />
the University of Pennsylvania<br />
psychologist Paul Rozin,<br />
renowned for his theories<br />
on the role that fear and<br />
disgust play in modern food<br />
culture. Overwhelmed by the<br />
abundance and variety of<br />
foods in our groceries, and<br />
flooded with competing health<br />
claims, we can’t help but make<br />
instinctive food-purchase<br />
decisions, subject to the whims<br />
of the latest trends and health<br />
scares. No wonder that, when<br />
confronted with ambiguities<br />
in health-based marketing<br />
claims, we fill in the gaps<br />
with inaccurate inferences, as<br />
one 2013 study found. Labels<br />
bragging about supposed<br />
health benefits, such as low<br />
fat content, create what the<br />
study described as a “halo,” a<br />
vague but positive glow that<br />
temporarily relieves our foodcentered<br />
anxieties—at least<br />
long enough to get through<br />
checkout.<br />
•MICHAEL FITZGERALD is a<br />
<strong>Pacific</strong> <strong>Standard</strong> senior editor.<br />
@MCHLFTZGRLD<br />
MAY/JUNE <strong>2017</strong> • PSMAG.COM 15
FIELD<br />
NOTES<br />
DISPATCHES<br />
FROM<br />
UNFAMILIAR<br />
TERRITORY<br />
JHARIA, INDIA<br />
An underground fire, which locals say first started<br />
in an abandoned mine here in 1916, still burns as<br />
workers tap the remaining supply of coal.<br />
PHOTO BY JOHNNY HAGLUND<br />
16 MAY/JUNE <strong>2017</strong> • PSMAG.COM
March of the<br />
Refugees<br />
In Hegyeshalom, one of<br />
the last Hungarian villages<br />
before the Austrian border,<br />
clothes cover the ground.<br />
They rest in piles on the<br />
side of the road and hang<br />
off shrubs and trees. There<br />
are abandoned baby carriages,<br />
fully packed duffel<br />
bags, and pieces of plastic<br />
litter strewn about all the<br />
way to the horizon.<br />
It is September of 2015,<br />
and, every half hour or so,<br />
hundreds of refugees and<br />
migrants march from the<br />
village train station toward<br />
Austria. The first time my<br />
traveling companion and<br />
I pull our car alongside<br />
them with supplies, we are<br />
mobbed. “Water, water,<br />
water!” they shout, fighting<br />
to reach into the back<br />
seat. Within a minute and<br />
a half, the car is emptied of<br />
everything we’ve brought,<br />
and the column—order restored—moves<br />
on. A small<br />
girl, maybe six, asks me if<br />
there’s more water. I give<br />
her a stuffed rabbit, which<br />
seemed less absurd when I<br />
decided to buy it.<br />
When we return to the<br />
site with more water, we<br />
find other volunteers by<br />
the side of the road. Anna,<br />
a pink-cheeked 15-yearold<br />
Austrian, cries as she<br />
describes how, at certain<br />
points, the police have not<br />
allowed them to provide<br />
assistance. To deal with<br />
her anger, she tells me, she<br />
wrote a poem about how<br />
“they are not letting us be<br />
human, because it is human<br />
to help people.”<br />
We unload our water,<br />
and Anna and the other<br />
volunteers explain the<br />
rules. The police will not<br />
interfere, Anna says, as<br />
long as the people do not<br />
stop moving. We stagger<br />
the piles of water bottles<br />
to prevent bottlenecks<br />
and hand them off without<br />
making anyone break<br />
stride. Half-liter bottles are<br />
best: People are too tired,<br />
their hands too full, to<br />
carry anything bigger. Even<br />
the small bottles we hand<br />
them are abandoned 50<br />
yards down the road, still<br />
half-full. Children’s shoes<br />
are also frequently discarded,<br />
so parents may hoist<br />
their youngsters without<br />
the extra weight.<br />
An old woman sits down<br />
in the dirt, gestures to her<br />
feet, and begins to cry. I ask<br />
the police if they will drive<br />
her to the border. They will<br />
not, but they won’t prevent<br />
us from doing it.<br />
I pat my chest and pretend<br />
to hold a steering<br />
wheel, trying to communicate<br />
a sense of safety and assurance,<br />
which is ridiculous<br />
given the circumstances of<br />
our meeting. Another woman<br />
makes a motion with her<br />
thumb—I think she’s asking<br />
if they’ll be processed at the<br />
border. I have no idea. Like<br />
many of the volunteers, I’m<br />
wearing a fluorescent vest<br />
that is meant to signify authority<br />
but really signifies<br />
nothing. I got it from under<br />
the seat of the rental car<br />
we’re sleeping in. We take<br />
the old woman and her family<br />
to the border one carload<br />
atatime.<br />
We do our best to drive<br />
all those who are too young,<br />
old, injured, or despondent<br />
to keep walking. While we<br />
see every conceivable demographic,<br />
the most common<br />
is young, male, and<br />
middle class—the most able<br />
to afford the smuggler’s<br />
fees. They tell us how their<br />
parents or grandparents<br />
chose to stay behind in Syria,<br />
Iraq, or Afghanistan, or<br />
how they were kidnapped<br />
and mugged by their smugglers,<br />
or how they have lost,<br />
or lost track of, friends and<br />
family along the way. We<br />
see an injured man being<br />
carried by four others, and<br />
another man traveling with<br />
his cat. Some have been<br />
trying to reach Europe for<br />
weeks; others have been at<br />
it for a year.<br />
“Just two kilometers,” I<br />
tell a man, as I hand him his<br />
water bottle. “And what is<br />
there?” he asks warily. Austria,<br />
I say. He is ecstatic.<br />
People do not know<br />
where they are, or even what<br />
country they’re in. An endless<br />
series of buses or trains<br />
dumps them in strange<br />
places, and when they get off<br />
and resume walking, they’re<br />
not told where or how far<br />
they have to go.<br />
After hours of people<br />
trickling past us 20 or 30 at<br />
a time, a larger police presence<br />
materializes around<br />
nightfall. The largest column<br />
we’ve seen marches<br />
toward us, and we realize<br />
what it is: the last trainload<br />
before authorities<br />
close Hungary’s southern<br />
border. We linger there<br />
purposelessly for a few<br />
minutes in the dark.<br />
When we finally get in<br />
the car, Hegyeshalom is<br />
silent. The only people left<br />
are the ones who live there,<br />
quietly preparing for bed<br />
inside their homes.<br />
—KASTALIA MEDRANO<br />
MAY/JUNE <strong>2017</strong> • PSMAG.COM 17
FIELD NOTES<br />
Freedom<br />
Square<br />
One morning last September,<br />
Gary Brown unzipped<br />
the front flap of the tent he<br />
had been living in for three<br />
weeks and stepped into the<br />
heat of the day.<br />
Holding a hand above<br />
his eyes to block the sun,<br />
he surveyed the scene in<br />
front of him—a dusty lot in<br />
Chicago’s North Lawndale<br />
neighborhood—looking to<br />
see what had changed since<br />
the night before. Not much:<br />
Two other sleeper tents<br />
were still there next to his<br />
on the lot’s grassy south<br />
edge. The improvised, tarproofed<br />
kitchen was still<br />
standing. So was a small<br />
library tent overflowing<br />
with donated books and a<br />
“store” tent crammed with<br />
free clothes and toiletries.<br />
People were setting out tables<br />
and covering them with<br />
back-to-school supplies:<br />
backpacks, notebooks, pens,<br />
and pencils. A few neighborhood<br />
children were<br />
cautiously browsing. Others<br />
were getting their faces<br />
painted at a crafts station.<br />
“Well, OK,” Brown said,<br />
nodding. At 46, the combination<br />
of his speaking<br />
style (slow and careful) and<br />
glasses (rectangular, blackframed)<br />
gives him a faintly<br />
professorial air. “I guess<br />
we’re still here.”<br />
Leading me around the<br />
lot, he recalled the evening<br />
he and his fiancée, Rebecca<br />
Thomas, moved in. Out<br />
for an evening stroll, the<br />
couple spotted the bustling<br />
encampment and stopped<br />
by, curious to see what the<br />
campers were up to. The<br />
people he met explained<br />
that they were activists,<br />
using the vacant lot to embody<br />
the spirit of a better<br />
North Lawndale—a place of<br />
mutual aid and celebratory<br />
pride instead of deprivation<br />
and police control.<br />
They were calling it Freedom<br />
Square, and they’d<br />
already been there for<br />
more than two weeks, sharing<br />
stories, serving meals,<br />
and talking through the<br />
forces—internal and external—that<br />
warped justice in<br />
the predominantly black<br />
and economically impoverished<br />
neighborhood.<br />
“We’ve lived here our<br />
entire lives, and we never<br />
saw anything like it,” Brown<br />
said. “Especially right here.”<br />
He pointed across the<br />
street at a warehouse-like<br />
brick structure, its parking<br />
lot surrounded by a<br />
fence topped with rows<br />
of barbed wire. Eighteen<br />
months earlier, the Guardian<br />
had begun publishing<br />
an investigative series<br />
about the building, widely<br />
referred to as Homan<br />
Square, that appeared to<br />
confirm many Chicagoans’<br />
worst fears about their police<br />
department. Officially,<br />
it is an evidence-storage<br />
facility. But police records<br />
obtained by the newspaper<br />
revealed that officers<br />
were taking suspects there<br />
to detain and interrogate<br />
them without charging<br />
them or providing access<br />
to lawyers (in many cases,<br />
charges were filed later).<br />
In some cases, according<br />
to former detainees, these<br />
interrogations involved<br />
physical abuse. The department<br />
denied wrongdoing<br />
and later fought civil-rights<br />
litigation over its practices<br />
at the facility.<br />
“I was never tortured,”<br />
said Brown, who remembered<br />
being held in Homan<br />
Square three times. “But<br />
I was treated unfairly,<br />
denied my rights. And,<br />
over the years, have I met<br />
people who were tortured,<br />
or abused, or whatever you<br />
want to call it? Of course.<br />
Probably most people in<br />
North Lawndale have.”<br />
Brown and Thomas liked<br />
what they heard that first<br />
night. By the next morning,<br />
they’d returned and set up a<br />
tent. It wasn’t just the message.<br />
It was also the encampment<br />
itself—the sense<br />
of community, the pleasure<br />
of publicly demanding more<br />
from the world while simultaneously<br />
taking responsibility<br />
for a small piece of it.<br />
Plus, the couple was looking<br />
for a place to live. Through<br />
the summer, they’d been<br />
staying with members of<br />
Brown’s extended family<br />
while he looked for work,<br />
but the situation had become<br />
crowded and tense.<br />
Their tent was an upgrade,<br />
at least in terms of privacy.<br />
“It felt good,” Brown<br />
said. “Not easy, but good.”<br />
His favorite memories<br />
might have been the nights<br />
when neighborhood children<br />
would gather in the<br />
lot to watch movies projected<br />
from someone’s laptop<br />
onto a white sheet—the<br />
electricity and extension<br />
cords supplied by sympa-<br />
18 MAY/JUNE <strong>2017</strong> • PSMAG.COM
DISPATCHES FROM UNFAMILIAR TERRITORY<br />
thetic neighbors. Or maybe<br />
the best moments were the<br />
emotional visits from people<br />
who had been held and<br />
beaten at Homan Square.<br />
He couldn’t decide.<br />
Early on, some campers<br />
had settled on a practical<br />
demand: They would camp<br />
until a “Blue Lives Matter”<br />
ordinance proposed<br />
by a Chicago alderman was<br />
withdrawn or defeated.<br />
(It would have expanded<br />
Chicago’s hate-crime laws<br />
to cover police officers,<br />
firefighters, and emergency<br />
medical personnel.) But<br />
it was clear, from what<br />
Brown and everyone else<br />
told me, that the demand<br />
meant less to them than<br />
the atmosphere of possibility<br />
at the camp. People<br />
from across the city and<br />
beyond stopped by at all<br />
hours with donations and<br />
messages of support. And<br />
when police walking to<br />
work from a nearby parking<br />
lot stared at the campers,<br />
the campers stared<br />
back, or reveled in ignoring<br />
them. “We’re here to imagine<br />
a world without police,<br />
and to help everyone else<br />
imagine it too,” the playwright<br />
Kristiana Rae Colón<br />
said. She tipped her head<br />
in the direction of Homan<br />
Square. “Even them.”<br />
Brown didn’t quite agree;<br />
ultimately, he thought, society<br />
needed police. But he<br />
still liked being there.<br />
On the day Brown and<br />
I met—day 45 of Freedom<br />
Square—the project’s future<br />
was uncertain. The<br />
encampment had been<br />
started spontaneously, with<br />
no advance planning, by a<br />
small collective of young<br />
Chicago artist-activists<br />
called #LetUsBreathe<br />
(Colón is a founding member).<br />
For weeks, the group’s<br />
members had been slipping<br />
closer to exhaustion as they<br />
battled nights of torrential<br />
GOSEONG, SOUTH KOREA<br />
A South Korean soldier looks over the DMZ from<br />
a guard position on top of Observation Post 717,<br />
on the edge of the North Korean border.<br />
PHOTO BY TOMAS VAN HOUTRYVE/VII/REDUX<br />
rain, tried to mediate infighting<br />
without betraying<br />
deeply held ideals about<br />
justice and control, and did<br />
their best to provide a modicum<br />
of round-the-clock security.<br />
On day 41, they had<br />
posted an announcement<br />
online, explaining that they<br />
could no longer assume responsibility<br />
for the project<br />
they’d started.<br />
When I returned to the<br />
square the following week,<br />
Brown and Thomas were<br />
the only people there. Activists<br />
were still dropping<br />
off supplies, they said. And<br />
the kitchen, library, and<br />
store were still standing.<br />
But without daily upkeep,<br />
they were slouching into<br />
ruin. “Kids come by and<br />
knock stuff over, take stuff,”<br />
Brown said. “It’s sad.”<br />
Looking for lunch, we got<br />
in my car. Between driving<br />
instructions, Brown and<br />
Thomas pointed out personal<br />
landmarks (churches<br />
they’d attended, schools<br />
where they’d grown up) or,<br />
in some cases, vacant lots<br />
where landmarks used to<br />
be. In a few, grass was growing<br />
up through the cracks<br />
in the pavement, stretching<br />
five or even six feet tall.<br />
When I stopped by the<br />
lot again the following<br />
week, Brown and Thomas’<br />
tent was gone. When I<br />
called Brown, he told me<br />
that life in the tent had<br />
become too difficult. Now<br />
they were living in an unfinished<br />
home that he was<br />
helping renovate. They<br />
had a few weeks to find another<br />
place to stay. “When<br />
we moved in, it was about<br />
feeling free together, as a<br />
community,” Brown said. “I<br />
liked that feeling. I’d like to<br />
feel it again, I really would.<br />
And I’d like it to last.”<br />
—PETER C. BAKER<br />
MAY/JUNE <strong>2017</strong> • PSMAG.COM 19
FIELD NOTES<br />
LIRA, UGANDA<br />
Prisoners, many of whom claim to be juveniles,<br />
line up for dinner at Lira Prison. Poor birth records<br />
make it difficult for Ugandan prison officials to<br />
remove younger prisoners from adult facilities.<br />
PHOTO BY LYNSEY ADDARIO<br />
Delicate<br />
Arch<br />
The trail starts out wide,<br />
flat, and graveled. Soon,<br />
though, the easy going ends,<br />
and the route takes hikers<br />
up and over a broad, smooth<br />
rock face, marked occasion-<br />
ally by small cairns. From<br />
the top of the bald slickrock<br />
dome, the trail twists and<br />
turns through a maze of<br />
rock and sand. Finally, it<br />
runs up along a narrow rock<br />
ledge and into a vast natural<br />
amphitheater. Visitors<br />
climb through a window in<br />
the rock and arrive in the<br />
amphitheater’s nosebleed<br />
section. Golden rock curves<br />
away on both sides, tapering<br />
to create a stage at the<br />
lower end. The tall, steeply<br />
curved rock of Delicate<br />
Arch is the star at its center.<br />
When I arrive at 7:16 p.m.<br />
on an April evening, I count<br />
49 people ahead of me—<br />
and as I take in the scene,<br />
more hikers climb into the<br />
amphitheater behind me.<br />
It’s taken me 30 minutes<br />
to cover the 1.5 miles from<br />
the parking lot: a moderate<br />
hike, but just challeng-<br />
20 MAY/JUNE <strong>2017</strong> • PSMAG.COM
DISPATCHES FROM UNFAMILIAR TERRITORY<br />
ing enough to exclude the<br />
many national-park visitors<br />
who never stray more<br />
than a few hundred feet<br />
from their cars. Still, more<br />
people keep arriving. I<br />
count seven high-end DSLR<br />
cameras mounted on tripods<br />
and two smartphones<br />
riding on selfie sticks. Some<br />
people have brought picnic<br />
blankets, cans of beer, and<br />
bottles of wine. One cluster,<br />
announcing themselves as<br />
Wisconsinites, has brought<br />
cheese curds. “That’s how<br />
we roll,” one of them says to<br />
a neighboring group.<br />
“Guys, this is the golden<br />
hour,” someone else says.<br />
And it is. A rich, warm glow<br />
fills the amphitheater and<br />
lights up the arch below us.<br />
The effect is something like<br />
looking through a glass jar<br />
of honey held up to the sun.<br />
Delicate Arch is the most<br />
famous rock formation in<br />
Arches National Park—and,<br />
almost certainly, in the entire<br />
state of Utah. It’s been<br />
frequented by travelers for<br />
over a century—decades<br />
before some of the park’s<br />
other arches were officially<br />
identified. And it’s been<br />
called by a few names over<br />
the years: Cowboy’s Chaps,<br />
Old Maid’s Bloomers. But<br />
the more dignified moniker<br />
stuck. In 1996, an image of<br />
the arch landed on Utah’s<br />
license plate, to commemorate<br />
the centennial<br />
of statehood.<br />
As Delicate Arch has become<br />
more prominent, so<br />
too has Arches itself. The<br />
park saw just over 16,000<br />
visitors in 1950, when it<br />
was still just a national<br />
monument. In 2015, that<br />
number had climbed to<br />
nearly 1.4 million. For<br />
thousands of people each<br />
year, watching the sun rise<br />
or set over Delicate Arch<br />
is an Arches must-do. The<br />
crowd I’ve joined is, if anything,<br />
smaller than usual.<br />
As the honey-colored<br />
light intensifies to its peak,<br />
and the long shadow of the<br />
amphitheater’s upper wall<br />
creeps toward the arch,<br />
the more serious photographers<br />
scramble eagerly<br />
from one spot to another,<br />
clicking away. Others are<br />
happy to sit back and take<br />
in the show. A younger,<br />
bearded guy ambles by,<br />
shirt unbuttoned and beer<br />
in hand, and notices my<br />
notebook. “That’s a good<br />
idea,” he says. “I should<br />
have brought my journal.”<br />
A few minutes later, as a<br />
girl poses for a selfie down<br />
in front of the arch, he hollers,<br />
“That’s so sexy!”<br />
Delicate Arch at sunset<br />
should be my nightmare: I<br />
like my national parks empty<br />
and serene. But instead,<br />
I find myself smiling at the<br />
beer-drinking bros, at the<br />
selfie-takers, at the selfserious<br />
amateur photographers<br />
with their bazooka<br />
lenses and tripods. I think<br />
back to a moment from<br />
Michael Ondaatje’s novel<br />
In the Skin of a Lion. One of<br />
the characters is listening<br />
to an audience in a movie<br />
theater laugh together on<br />
cue, when he realizes that<br />
this shared laughter is, in<br />
its way, a conversation.<br />
We often seek out solitude<br />
in the wilderness, but humans<br />
are social animals at<br />
heart. And what’s happening<br />
here is a communal experience—a<br />
collective sharing of<br />
something beautiful.<br />
In Desert Solitaire, Edward<br />
Abbey wrote: “There<br />
are several ways of looking<br />
at Delicate Arch. Depending<br />
on your preconceptions<br />
you may see the eroded<br />
remnant of a sandstone fin,<br />
a giant engagement ring<br />
cemented in rock, a bowlegged<br />
pair of petrified cowboy<br />
chaps, a triumphal arch<br />
for a procession of angels,<br />
an illogical geologic freak,<br />
a happening—a something<br />
that happened and will never<br />
happen quite that way<br />
“Suit yourself.<br />
You may see a<br />
symbol, a<br />
sign, a fact, a<br />
thing without<br />
meaning or a<br />
meaning<br />
which includes<br />
all things.<br />
”<br />
again, a frame more significant<br />
than its picture, a simple<br />
monolith eaten away by<br />
weather and time and soon<br />
to disintegrate into a chaos<br />
of falling rock.... Suit yourself.<br />
You may see a symbol,<br />
a sign, a fact, a thing without<br />
meaning or a meaning<br />
which includes all things.”<br />
On this night, where I suppose<br />
some others might see<br />
a tourist trap, I see a gathering<br />
place.<br />
The light fades fast, and<br />
the cold desert night moves<br />
in. The audience leaves<br />
in a slow stream—when I<br />
pack up to go, there are still<br />
more than a dozen people<br />
scattered across the amphitheater,<br />
watching the last of<br />
the day’s color and warmth<br />
drain out of the rock. Halfway<br />
back to the car, I have<br />
to pull out my headlamp<br />
to see the gravel trail at my<br />
feet. I look back at the slickrock<br />
dome and see a cluster<br />
of headlamps bobbing down<br />
the rock together—fireflies<br />
in the Utah night.<br />
—EVA HOLLAND<br />
MAY/JUNE <strong>2017</strong> • PSMAG.COM 21
THE FIX<br />
• JIMMY TOBIAS is a <strong>Pacific</strong> <strong>Standard</strong> contributing writer and freelance journalist<br />
covering extinction, extraction, and environmental justice. @JAMESCTOBIAS<br />
SOLUTIONS, AND<br />
THE PEOPLE<br />
WORKING<br />
TOWARD THEM<br />
Leading the<br />
Way in Wildlife<br />
Restoration<br />
Across the country,<br />
Native American<br />
nations like the Colville<br />
confederacy are flexing<br />
their treaty rights by<br />
reintroducing key<br />
species to the landscape.<br />
BY JIMMY TOBIAS<br />
I AM ADMIRING a<br />
stuffed gray wolf<br />
and other taxidermy<br />
displays in<br />
the imposing new<br />
headquarters of the Confederated<br />
Tribes of the Colville Reservation<br />
in Washington state when Richard<br />
Whitney, an affable man with broad<br />
shoulders and a single black braid,<br />
finally arrives. He shakes my hand.<br />
He smiles. He’s a little late, he explains,<br />
because he was up all night<br />
smoking salmon for his daughter’s<br />
impending wedding in Seattle.<br />
Then he’s off again. He grabs<br />
telemetry equipment. He snags a<br />
spotting scope and some snacks.<br />
He leads me to a white Toyota<br />
pick-up parked in the sprawling<br />
lot, turns the key, hits the gas, and we’re on our way, zipping along the Columbia<br />
River and climbing high onto a basalt-studded plateau from which one can see<br />
the beginnings of the Cascade mountains many miles to the west.<br />
Whitney, a wildlife biologist and reservation resident, is spending the day with<br />
me as we travel tribal lands looking for a lovely and elusive animal that had, until<br />
recently, been absent from the landscape for a century or more. Like many other<br />
indigenous nations across the country, the Colville tribes are ardent defenders of<br />
nature and leaders in restoring native wildlife to their territory. Many tribal members<br />
see wildlife restoration as a direct expression of their self-determination and<br />
sovereignty. Helping pronghorn antelope return to Washington, an achievement<br />
more than a decade in the making, is their latest contribution to the cause.<br />
“The way we see it is, any native species that belongs here, that should have<br />
been here ... why not bring it [back]?” says Whitney, chatting away behind the<br />
22 MAY/JUNE <strong>2017</strong> • PSMAG.COM<br />
ILLUSTRATION BY MIKE MCQUADE
Back From the Brink<br />
THE COLVILLE CONFEDERACY IS NOT<br />
ALONE. IN THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST<br />
AND BEYOND, NUMEROUS OTHER TRIBES<br />
ARE LEADING THE WAY WHEN IT<br />
COMES TO WILDLIFE REINTRODUCTION.<br />
BY JIMMY TOBIAS<br />
SALMON<br />
The Columbia<br />
River Inter-Tribal<br />
Fish Commission,<br />
a joint project<br />
of the Yakama,<br />
Warm Springs,<br />
Umatilla, and Nez<br />
Perce tribes, is<br />
one of the most<br />
prominent salmonconservation<br />
organizations in<br />
the country. Since<br />
its inception in<br />
1977, it has used<br />
habitat restoration,<br />
fish reintroduction,<br />
and treaty-rights<br />
lawsuits to bring<br />
steelhead trout as<br />
well as Chinook<br />
and coho salmon<br />
back to waterways<br />
throughout the<br />
Columbia River<br />
system.<br />
PRONGHORN<br />
Like the<br />
confederated<br />
Colville tribes, the<br />
Yakama people<br />
have reintroduced<br />
pronghorn<br />
antelope onto<br />
their reservation in<br />
central Washington.<br />
The animals, 99 of<br />
which were released<br />
on tribal lands in<br />
2011, are thriving.<br />
BISON<br />
In northern<br />
Montana, bison<br />
have already been<br />
reintroduced on<br />
the Fort Peck and<br />
Fort Belknap Indian<br />
Reservations.<br />
And now the<br />
Blackfeet tribe has<br />
announced plans<br />
to launch a bison<br />
reintroduction<br />
program as<br />
well. The onceubiquitous<br />
ungulates are<br />
making a major<br />
comeback.<br />
CONDORS<br />
In an effort to help<br />
“heal the world,”<br />
the Yurok tribe is<br />
in the early stages<br />
of a bold effort<br />
to reintroduce<br />
the critically<br />
endangered<br />
California condor<br />
to the mountainous<br />
landscape of<br />
northern California.<br />
The tribe considers<br />
the charismatic<br />
bird a sacred<br />
animal. In Idaho,<br />
meanwhile, the Nez<br />
Perce people are<br />
preparing a condor<br />
restoration project<br />
of their own.<br />
wheel. State and federal officials as well as local agricultural<br />
interests, he adds, don’t have much of a say in the matter.<br />
Washington’s wildlife authorities are well aware of the tribes’<br />
prerogative to do as they please.<br />
“They’re a sovereign nation and they’re releasing animals<br />
on their land,” says Rich Harris, a section manager with the<br />
Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife. “We communicate,<br />
we were made aware of [the reintroduction], and we’re<br />
not objecting to it.” But even if the state had objected, he adds,<br />
“I don’t think it would have mattered.”<br />
And so the pronghorn antelope finally came home to the<br />
shrub-steppe country of the Colville Reservation in January<br />
of 2016. But finding the fleet-footed creatures—the fastest<br />
land mammals in North America—is no sure bet. We have a<br />
day to achieve our goal, and, on this early August morning,<br />
with the truck bouncing and bobbing over washboard roads,<br />
we barrel into the backcountry.<br />
ONCE, before white people were here, 35 million pronghorn<br />
rambled across the continent, from northern Mexico to central<br />
Canada, confined more or less to the western side of the<br />
100 th meridian. Only bison, in their massive millions, outnumbered<br />
the antelope. The petite and tawny ungulates made<br />
their living on forbs and shrubs and grasses, migrating where<br />
the food and the weather were amenable, fearing few predators<br />
until the colonizers came and changed everything.<br />
Like so many other species, pronghorn suffered near-extermination<br />
at the hands of European migrants, with their disruptive<br />
land-use practices and powerful technologies. Overhunting,<br />
competition from livestock, and habitat fragmentation had<br />
a catastrophic effect, says John Byers, a University of Idaho biology<br />
professor and pronghorn researcher. By the 1920s, there<br />
were fewer than 20,000 pronghorn left in the United States. In<br />
Washington, they were wiped out completely.<br />
“From our anthropologists and historians, we know there<br />
were pronghorn here,” says Mike Marchand, chairman of<br />
the Colville confederacy, sitting in his small corner office at<br />
headquarters. Indeed, paleozoological research suggests that<br />
pronghorn were present in consistent though limited numbers<br />
in Washington for much of the last 10,000 years. But they<br />
have been extirpated for roughly a century. “We don’t know<br />
the word for antelope,” Marchand adds. “That sort of tells you<br />
something. It has been a while.”<br />
Things turned around in the 20 th century. The Boone and<br />
Crockett Club (a hunting and conservation organization<br />
founded by Teddy Roosevelt) and the National Audubon<br />
Society, with support from the White House, established a<br />
500,000-acre federal antelope refuge in northern Nevada<br />
in 1936. In the 1960s, the struggling Sonoran subspecies<br />
received Endangered Species Preservation Act protection.<br />
Since then, conservation efforts, from habitat restoration to<br />
hunting restrictions, have continued apace, and there are now<br />
an estimated 700,000 pronghorn in the U.S. Populations are<br />
particularly robust in Montana, Wyoming, and Nevada.<br />
Despite this rebound, however, antelope were still missing<br />
from Washington at the turn of the new millennium. The<br />
Colville confederacy was determined to change that.<br />
MAY/JUNE <strong>2017</strong> • PSMAG.COM 23
THE FIX<br />
“I think that is the common philosophy<br />
we have,” says Marchand, a<br />
mellow fellow sporting a Washington<br />
Huskies sweatshirt and a Yankees<br />
cap. “That our traditions are the ultimate<br />
best and whatever we did in<br />
the past was probably more pure and<br />
good for us as people.”<br />
His nation, he says, is trying to bring<br />
back what was here before, and what<br />
was here were hordes of salmon, plentiful<br />
game, and, of course, pronghorn.<br />
WHITNEY HAD planned to meet two<br />
colleagues in the middle of the high<br />
plateau where the antelope live, and<br />
from there our group would begin the<br />
pursuit in earnest. When we arrive at<br />
the rendezvous, however, the other<br />
team members are missing. Whitney<br />
pulls over, gets on the radio, and soon<br />
discovers why: a flat tire thanks to<br />
daily beatings from the rugged roads.<br />
We find the others at the edge of<br />
an open expanse of prairie grass and<br />
bitterbrush. As we wait for biologist<br />
Eric Krausz to jack up the truck and<br />
replace the tire, Whitney scans the<br />
land with binoculars.<br />
There is no sign of them. In the<br />
parched grass, the tan antelope blend in<br />
as surely as anonymous pedestrians in<br />
any metropolis. Their acute vision and<br />
a top speed of 60 miles per hour mean<br />
they can avoid potential predators, including<br />
humans, with relative ease.<br />
AS WHITNEY and his crew can tell<br />
you, reintroducing pronghorn to a<br />
place they haven’t been in a century is<br />
a tough undertaking.<br />
In May of 2015, the tribes received<br />
permission from the state of Nevada<br />
to take 52 pronghorn, transport them<br />
to Washington, and release them on<br />
the reservation. But first, wildlife staffers<br />
had to prepare the ground for the<br />
antelopes’ arrival: They spent months<br />
assessing and improving the quality<br />
of potential habitat on tribal lands,<br />
reforming grazing practices, and removing<br />
barbed-wire fences, which can<br />
do deadly damage to the species. Then<br />
the day came to close the deal.<br />
In late January of 2016, as antelope<br />
scattered and fled before the staccato<br />
thwack of a chopper flying low above<br />
the Nevada plains, a gunner leaned<br />
out and shot projectile nets at them.<br />
One by one they were trapped, hauled<br />
to a staging ground, collared, and<br />
made as comfortable as possible for<br />
the long trip ahead.<br />
Because pronghorn are so energetic,<br />
they can fatally overheat when handled<br />
or confined. With this in mind,<br />
Whitney and his crew had selected the<br />
coldest time of the year to conduct the<br />
operation. The team had horse trailers<br />
at the ready when the captured<br />
pronghorn were brought in from the<br />
field. They loaded them up as quickly<br />
as possible and immediately began the<br />
14-hour drive from Nevada to Colville.<br />
“It was crazy,” Whitney says. “We<br />
threw them in the trailers and as soon<br />
as a trailer would get full we would get<br />
on the road.” The crew drove in pairs,<br />
non-stop, with only brief breaks to fill<br />
up the gas tank or hit the bathroom.<br />
After arriving on the reservation, and<br />
with little further handling, the pronghorn<br />
were released back into the Washington<br />
wilds. Tribal members wanted<br />
to be out on the plateau the next day to<br />
see their new neighbors, but they were<br />
told to give the pronghorn space to acclimate<br />
to their adoptive home. As it<br />
turned out, even without disruptions<br />
from human admirers, the ungulates<br />
struggled—and many failed—to survive.<br />
OFFICIALS IN Washington tried three<br />
times in the early 20 th century to<br />
reintroduce pronghorn. Three times<br />
they failed.<br />
Only the tribes have succeeded.<br />
First to pull it off was the Yakama Nation,<br />
in central Washington, which in<br />
2011 restored antelope to its reservation<br />
after seeking early encouragement<br />
from the Colville program. Ultimately<br />
the Colvilles required a few<br />
additional years to bring their own<br />
initiative to fruition.<br />
In the beginning, things were rocky.<br />
At least 14 of the 52 Colville antelope<br />
died their first winter, most suffering<br />
from stress and shock. The rest survived<br />
and, eventually, thrived. Some<br />
managed to have babies that spring. A<br />
small group even ventured beyond the<br />
reservation, swimming across the Columbia<br />
to try its luck among the farming<br />
settlements on the far side.<br />
For Whitney, it was sweet consolation<br />
to see the pronghorn colonizing<br />
other lands.<br />
“I don’t know if that is desirable for<br />
the state of Washington or not, but<br />
for us, we are about restoring the species<br />
to the state,” he says. The tribes<br />
plan to reintroduce an additional 50<br />
antelope to the reservation this year.<br />
Restoring ecological relationships;<br />
reviving the species’ cultural significance;<br />
even hunting the antelope someday—that,<br />
Whitney says, is the tribes’<br />
vision. In our time of indigenous-led<br />
protests against fossil-fuel development<br />
and environmental destruction,<br />
the restoration of native wildlife is<br />
another strategy that First Peoples are<br />
deploying to help heal this continent.<br />
ERIC KRAUSZ’S truck rumbles fast<br />
in front of us as a technician leans<br />
out the passenger window holding<br />
a telemetry antenna, hoping to hear<br />
signals emitted from the radio collars<br />
of our quarry. As their vehicle kicks<br />
up dry dust, Whitney and I fall a bit<br />
behind. Then way behind. Then the<br />
other truck is out of sight altogether.<br />
Then they appear—so suddenly<br />
that it takes us a second to slow down.<br />
Nine antelope—small and lithe, with<br />
alien eyes—burst from a dense lakeside<br />
thicket. They are less than a hundred<br />
feet from us but, for some reason, they<br />
reduce their speed. They stop. They<br />
stand still, silhouetted against the surrounding<br />
shrub-steppe. Some of them<br />
hide behind a hill, only their ears and<br />
eyes poking above, like scouts surveying<br />
a battlefield. Two little fawns as cute<br />
as hay-colored colts stand on skinny<br />
legs. They stare at us and we stare back.<br />
Then, with their perfect camouflage<br />
on full display, they melt away.<br />
“Oh, man. That was ... it doesn’t get<br />
any better than that,” Whitney says,<br />
smiling widely, shocked at our proximity<br />
to the skittish speedsters. “That<br />
was ridiculous.”<br />
We quickly climb into the truck and<br />
circle back to see if we can manage a<br />
second sighting. But when we come<br />
around the hill, we can’t find them.<br />
The antelope offered us one quick<br />
glimpse, left us giddy, and were gone.<br />
24 MAY/JUNE <strong>2017</strong> • PSMAG.COM
• PETER MOSKOWITZ is a freelance writer and author of How to Kill a City:<br />
Gentrification, Inequality, and the Fight for the Neighborhood. @PTRMSK<br />
America’s Favorite Gun Researcher<br />
John Lott is a one-man pro-gun research machine<br />
whose work has been cited nearly 200 times by the<br />
National Rifle Association. The problem? Many of his<br />
peers have major misgivings about his methods.<br />
BY PETER MOSKOWITZ<br />
I RETURNED from Orlando<br />
depressed. I was<br />
there reporting a few<br />
days after a man had<br />
opened fire in a crowded<br />
nightclub with a semi-automatic<br />
weapon, killing 49 and wounding<br />
dozens of others. Mass shootings<br />
have been a common news item in the<br />
United States over the last few years,<br />
but this one seemed different, both in<br />
its scale and in the response (or lack<br />
thereof ) that followed.<br />
After Columbine (two high school<br />
seniors shot and killed 12 students and<br />
one teacher), Sandy Hook (one man<br />
shot and killed 20 six- and seven-yearolds<br />
and six adults), Fort Hood (an<br />
Army major shot and killed 13 people<br />
and injured 30 more), the Navy Yard<br />
in Washington, D.C. (a man shot and<br />
killed 12 at a naval base), Aurora (a<br />
man shot and killed 12 and injured 70<br />
in a movie theater), and Charlotte (a<br />
white supremacist shot and killed nine<br />
black churchgoers), there was at least<br />
debate about what to do. Background<br />
checks? End the sale of assault rifles?<br />
Create an interstate tracking system?<br />
A few days after Orlando, President<br />
Barack Obama, speaking on the blocklong<br />
grass field in the downtown<br />
district where thousands of mourners<br />
had left notes to those who died at<br />
Pulse nightclub, implored lawmakers<br />
to “do the right thing”—to change<br />
their minds about background checks,<br />
to consider legislation, to at least create<br />
a watch list for suspected terrorists<br />
who want to purchase guns. It was<br />
a milquetoast speech. And nothing<br />
followed it. There were no new laws;<br />
the push for background checks failed.<br />
The usual debate that had raged in the<br />
U.S. after mass shootings in the past<br />
did not happen after Orlando. Calls<br />
for specific action had turned into<br />
pleas to at least acknowledge there<br />
was a problem. It was the deadliest<br />
mass shooting in modern U.S. history,<br />
and yet the debate had gone so far<br />
backwards that gun-control advocates<br />
were no longer advocating for control,<br />
but for some debate about control.<br />
ILLUSTRATION BY MIKE MCQUADE<br />
MAY/JUNE <strong>2017</strong> • PSMAG.COM 25
THE FIX<br />
In Orlando, I’d attended a gun show<br />
where, outside, an LED sign had been<br />
set up to scroll the hashtag #PrayForOrlando,<br />
and, inside, everyone told<br />
me that guns did not kill people. Even<br />
at the memorial, the same one Obama<br />
spoke at, yards away from where family<br />
members of the deceased were gathering,<br />
crying, adding to a quickly growing<br />
pile of flowers and homemade signs<br />
with their letters streaked from a nearconstant<br />
drizzle, people told me that<br />
this was not about guns, that actually<br />
guns were good, that really the solution<br />
was more guns—guns at home, guns<br />
on the street, guns at clubs (or at least<br />
security guards with guns). There was<br />
relatively little gun debate in Orlando<br />
after Pulse, virtually no gun debate<br />
in Congress. There was just a general<br />
feeling that guns are good, and a feeling<br />
that, if you believe that, you’re right.<br />
A man named John Lott can be assigned<br />
a degree of responsibility.<br />
Lott is a one-man pro-gun research<br />
machine. He’s published four books<br />
on the subject. He speaks at countless<br />
conferences and colleges. He writes<br />
dozens of op-eds each year, and is<br />
cited in thousands of news stories. If<br />
you know a statistic or a fact-based<br />
argument about how guns save lives,<br />
it’s likely, whether you know it or not,<br />
you’re citing some of Lott’s work. Lott<br />
is not affiliated with any university,<br />
and hasn’t been for years. Little of his<br />
gun research has been published in<br />
peer-reviewed journals. And yet he is,<br />
without a doubt, the most influential<br />
pro-gun researcher in the U.S.<br />
I will not be able to debunk Lott here<br />
and now. I am not an academic. I—and<br />
99 percent of people, I’d venture to<br />
guess—am not as good with statistics<br />
as Lott. What I can tell you is what the<br />
people who do have that skillset say.<br />
There are many people who agree with<br />
Lott—especially in the fields of criminology<br />
and economics. But it appears<br />
the majority of researchers who work<br />
in the field say Lott’s wrong: that his<br />
analyses are misleading, that they skew<br />
data to favor certain outcomes, and that<br />
his research methods don’t stand up to<br />
scrutiny. If they did, his critics say, Lott<br />
would still be published in academic<br />
journals, or doing his research out of a<br />
university instead of a non-profit called<br />
the Crime Prevention Research Center.<br />
AFTER A BIT of coaxing, Lott agreed<br />
to meet me at a debate on campuscarry<br />
laws he’d be participating in at<br />
Baylor University in Waco, Texas. Lott<br />
arrived at the debate, his hair wispy,<br />
his suit loose-fitting, his shirt tucked<br />
in only halfway. The mostly conservative<br />
students who filed into the auditorium,<br />
dressed in well-fitting skirts<br />
and heels and khakis and boat shoes,<br />
looked like the best of conservative<br />
America—professional, jovial, past the<br />
more juvenile aspects of college. But<br />
Lott’s look just added to his authenticity.<br />
He exudes professorial vibes. He<br />
does not look like a snake-oil salesman.<br />
He is, it seems, a true believer.<br />
The school’s chapter of the Federalist<br />
Society, a national conservative group,<br />
had invited him here. According to Lott<br />
and another organizer, it took months<br />
to set the meeting up—first there was<br />
mysteriously no classroom available<br />
in the law school, where the Federalist<br />
Society usually held events, and then<br />
no one would debate Lott. Lott told me<br />
he’d reached out to around 20 people,<br />
including professors at Baylor, with no<br />
luck. The backdrop was this: Texas had<br />
recently passed a law mandating that<br />
public universities allow students to<br />
carry weapons on campus. It sparked<br />
protests at public schools, and pushed<br />
leaders of private schools to come down<br />
on a side of the gun debate. Ken Starr,<br />
Baylor’s president at the time, banned<br />
weapons from campus, a move a vocal<br />
minority of students disagreed with. So<br />
it made sense professors did not want<br />
to broach the issue. Instead, Lott found<br />
Andrea Brauer, the executive director<br />
of Texas Gun Sense, a small non-profit<br />
that pushes for small changes in gun<br />
laws in Texas.<br />
The debate went well for Lott—he<br />
arrived prepared with a PowerPoint<br />
chock full of data, most of which was<br />
based on his own research from his<br />
seminal book More Guns, Less Crime,<br />
published in 1998. He hit on all the progun<br />
tropes, and backed them with numbers—terrorists<br />
pick gun-free zones,<br />
he said; public shootings happen more<br />
frequently in Europe; good guys with<br />
guns stop bad ones. Brauer couldn’t<br />
compete. She had talking points, but<br />
she was not a researcher, she could<br />
not debunk him on technical grounds,<br />
and the audience was already in Lott’s<br />
pocket. She stumbled over her words.<br />
She let Lott speak over her and could<br />
only answer many of his retorts by saying<br />
he was wrong, but that she did not<br />
have the data to prove it. “Aren’t you<br />
making a feelings-based argument,”<br />
one student asked her. “That’s good for<br />
you, throwing your opinion out there,”<br />
another student said after the debate.<br />
“I know his research is flawed,”<br />
Brauer told me afterwards. “A lot has<br />
been discredited. But it’s hard to argue<br />
with him.”<br />
Lott’s main assertion is that states<br />
that pass right-to-carry laws (laws that<br />
allow you to carry a concealed handgun)<br />
have significantly lowered their<br />
crime rates. Lott first made the claim in<br />
a 1997 study that he conducted while at<br />
the University of Chicago, along with<br />
David Mustard, then a graduate student<br />
at the University of Chicago and now a<br />
respected economist at the University<br />
of Georgia. Lott expanded on the study<br />
in his More Guns book, a herculean<br />
undertaking: Lott, with a few assistants,<br />
collected 15 years’ worth of gun and<br />
violence data from 3,054 U.S. counties.<br />
It was, and still is, one of the grandest<br />
studies of gun violence ever conducted.<br />
Lott found that, were all 50 states to<br />
pass concealed-carry laws, more than<br />
1,500 murders, 60,000 aggravated assaults,<br />
and 4,000 rapes could be avoided<br />
per year. The influential criminologist<br />
Gary Kleck told Mother Jones that<br />
Lott’s early work “was light-years ahead<br />
of anybody else at the time.”<br />
Even those prone to support gun<br />
control agreed it was an impressive<br />
body of work. And for those who<br />
agree with Lott, More Guns remains<br />
one of the most important works in<br />
the field to date.<br />
“A lot of his research is some of the<br />
most highly cited research on firearms,”<br />
says Mustard, who hasn’t conducted<br />
research with Lott since their original<br />
project, though they’ve collaborated in<br />
other ways. “It’s clearly the most highly<br />
cited by academics and it’s also incredibly<br />
frequently cited by politicians.”<br />
26 MAY/JUNE <strong>2017</strong> • PSMAG.COM
SOLUTIONS, AND THE PEOPLE WORKING TOWARD THEM<br />
Lott’s work quickly became a favorite<br />
of pro-gun legislators, academics, and<br />
policy wonks, including at the National<br />
Rifle Association (the group’s Institute<br />
for Legislative Action has cited his<br />
work 175 times). And Lott’s research<br />
attracted media attention. According<br />
to one count, his work has been cited<br />
no fewer than 1,100 times in newspapers.<br />
After More Guns, Less Crime was<br />
published, Lott rose to be the most<br />
prominent gun researcher in America<br />
by far—appearing on television shows<br />
dozens of times a year, constantly touring<br />
college campuses, cited by state<br />
and federal lawmakers in gun-policy<br />
debates—all while being, according to<br />
many of his colleagues, wrong about his<br />
research. But that just shows the bias of<br />
academia, according to Lott.<br />
“In a field such as public health, I<br />
suspect a school like Harvard University<br />
may not even have a single Republican,”<br />
Lott wrote me in an email<br />
(he insisted on email after our initial<br />
in-person interview). “No matter how<br />
well done my research is there is no<br />
way someone who wrote the types of<br />
studies that I do would ever get hired<br />
there. The entire field is like that.”<br />
But researchers told me their qualms<br />
with Lott originate not in the field of<br />
politics, but basic scientific method.<br />
Several pointed out that concealedcarry<br />
laws tend to be passed after a<br />
spike in violent crime, and that many of<br />
the states Lott researched for his 1997<br />
paper passed laws right after the crack<br />
epidemic. But, as researchers have<br />
pointed out, most concealed-carry permits<br />
are issued to white men outside of<br />
urban areas, so Lott was measuring two<br />
separate trends—an increase in violent<br />
crime associated with the crack epidemic<br />
in urban areas, and an increase<br />
in concealed-carry permits in rural<br />
areas—and then concluding they influenced<br />
each other. Lott did discuss the<br />
crack epidemic in a footnote in 1997,<br />
and the rural-urban issue in later research<br />
that appeared in the influential<br />
American Economic Review, but he continued<br />
defending his position long after<br />
the scholarly consensus rejected it.<br />
“He’s able to find things in data that<br />
most people don’t,” says Daniel Webster,<br />
a professor of health policy at<br />
the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School<br />
of Public Health and the director of<br />
the school’s Center for Gun Policy<br />
and Research, noting that Lott hasn’t<br />
been peer-reviewed for his gun research<br />
in over a decade.<br />
Other researchers have found it<br />
problematic that Lott’s landmark<br />
1997 paper depended on the state of<br />
Florida and incorporated crime data<br />
he collected from police departments<br />
on his own, as opposed to relying<br />
solely on data from the Federal Bureau<br />
of Investigation. If you take out<br />
Florida, Lott’s claimed reductions in<br />
crime become much less dramatic.<br />
AFTER SANDY HOOK, Evan DeFilippis<br />
and Devin Hughes, two young,<br />
independent gun researchers, noticed<br />
the usual slew of pro-gun arguments<br />
on Facebook from conservative family<br />
members and friends. They realized<br />
that nearly all who used statistics<br />
in an attempt to prove that guns were<br />
safe relied solely on Lott’s work.<br />
As undergraduates at the University<br />
of Oklahoma, DeFilippis and<br />
Hughes began looking carefully into<br />
Lott’s research. They found that his<br />
models only worked under strict and<br />
often unrealistic conditions. Adding<br />
new variables often produced results<br />
that didn’t match real-world observations—a<br />
conclusion other researchers<br />
have also reached.<br />
“To debunk him, you have to dive<br />
down this rabbit hole [of data],”<br />
Hughes says. “People just don’t want<br />
to go down that rabbit hole, and they<br />
don’t realize how important he is to<br />
the entire pro-gun narrative.”<br />
In the four years immediately following<br />
the conclusion of Lott’s 1997<br />
study, 14 more jurisdictions passed<br />
concealed-carry laws. Ian Ayres, a<br />
lawyer and economist at Yale Law<br />
School, and Stanford Law School<br />
professor John Donohue, both of<br />
whom have published extensively on<br />
gun control, jointly wrote a 106-page<br />
takedown of Lott’s work in 2002.<br />
They decided to add those 14 jurisdictions<br />
to Lott’s models, and found that,<br />
in every jurisdiction, all categories of<br />
crime increased after concealed-carry<br />
laws were passed.<br />
David Hemenway, a professor of<br />
health policy at Harvard, found that,<br />
if you increase the unemployment<br />
rates in Lott’s models, homicides drop<br />
dramatically—the opposite of what<br />
research on gun violence and unemployment<br />
shows. And if you reduce the<br />
number of black women age 40 to 49 in<br />
Lott’s models by 1 percent, homicides<br />
drop by 59 percent and rapes increase<br />
by 74 percent. Hemenway argued that<br />
such massive effects from such a tiny<br />
change in just one demographic suggest<br />
Lott’s model is “no good.” Lott,<br />
as he usually does when criticized,<br />
responded with a litany of blog posts,<br />
op-eds, and media appearances.<br />
The failure of variable-testing<br />
Hemenway identified in Lott’s work<br />
is among the clearest signs that his<br />
methods are flawed. If research is<br />
strong, it should stand up to being<br />
tested and picked apart by other<br />
researchers, which is what the peerreview<br />
process is for. Lott’s recent<br />
research hasn’t gotten the same scrutiny<br />
most scientific researchers do,<br />
because if it did, other researchers<br />
told me, it would be torn apart.<br />
“He is, perhaps, perceived by some<br />
[to have] the same credibility as myself<br />
or other people who have published<br />
tons of stuff in scientific, peer-reviewed<br />
literature and have been through rigorous<br />
academic vetting,” Webster says.<br />
“He’s just some guy who anointed himself<br />
as the pro-gun researcher.”<br />
“What I dislike is he says all these<br />
things that are clearly wrong, and his<br />
science is not very good at all,” Hemenway<br />
says. John Donohue says Lott<br />
obfuscates with bad data, and won’t admit<br />
when he’s wrong. “Lott’s work was<br />
mainstreamed very quickly because<br />
it did appeal to a powerful economic<br />
interest, and political interests, and so<br />
the work got more prominence more<br />
rapidly than it probably deserved.”<br />
“What I’ve found over the years,<br />
at least for me, is the best way to<br />
move forward is to kind of pretend<br />
he doesn’t exist,” says Stephen Teret,<br />
another professor at the Bloomberg<br />
School of Public Health who is familiar<br />
with Lott’s work.<br />
These researchers hold the majority<br />
opinion. Hemenway, with the help<br />
MAY/JUNE <strong>2017</strong> • PSMAG.COM 27
THE FIX<br />
of his graduate students, compiled<br />
a list of academics in peer-reviewed<br />
journals who had published on gun<br />
safety within the last four years.<br />
Those surveyed came from various<br />
fields—criminology, economics, political<br />
science, public health, public<br />
policy. And there was a clear consensus:<br />
84 percent concluded guns in the<br />
home increase the risk of suicide, 64<br />
percent said guns make homes more<br />
dangerous in general, and 73 percent<br />
said guns are used for crimes more<br />
often than for self-defense. Perhaps<br />
most damningly for Lott, Hemenway’s<br />
survey found that only 9 percent of<br />
researchers thought that concealedcarry<br />
laws reduced gun violence rates.<br />
Lott countered with another survey<br />
showing that a smaller majority of researchers<br />
from only two fields (criminology<br />
and economics) agreed with<br />
him. “They only surveyed academics,<br />
and only three economists. That’s their<br />
way of discrediting my research,” he<br />
said. “They never mention all the published<br />
studies that confirm my results.<br />
They always want to make it seem like<br />
it’s only me saying these things.” Hemenway<br />
and others have disputed the<br />
results of Lott’s survey too.<br />
When challenged on his research,<br />
Lott has, in the past, resorted to<br />
odd behavior. He admitted to using<br />
an alternate online persona named<br />
Mary Rosh, who would defend Lott’s<br />
articles. “I shouldn’t have used it, but<br />
I didn’t want to get directly involved<br />
with my real name because I could not<br />
commit large blocks of time to discussions,”<br />
Lott said once the Rosh debacle<br />
was uncovered. Lott has also come<br />
under fire for writing an op-ed under<br />
the name of a real woman who had a<br />
stalker and became a gun advocate<br />
after her college would not provide her<br />
with adequate protection. Even progun-rights<br />
outlets like Townhall and<br />
Reason have criticized these efforts.<br />
And Lott has never publicly shared<br />
the data behind one of his most-cited<br />
statistics—that 98 percent of defensive<br />
gun use doesn’t even require a gun to<br />
be fired, just pulled out to scare away<br />
the attacker or intruder. When the late<br />
sociologist Otis Dudley Duncan, who<br />
pioneered the field of human ecology<br />
at the University of Chicago, asked Lott<br />
for more raw data, Lott said he’d lost it<br />
in a hard drive crash. Lott then redid<br />
the survey with a sample of about 1,000<br />
people, and found that 13 had used<br />
a gun in self-defense. Only one had<br />
actually fired the gun—not the largest<br />
sample, but even one out of 13 (7 percent)<br />
is far from the 2 percent that Lott<br />
has touted for most of his career.<br />
For every attack lobbed at him, Lott<br />
has hit back with lengthy posts on his<br />
blog that attempt to dismantle his<br />
opponent’s critiques. And in each one<br />
he dives deep into statistical analyses<br />
that seem designed to confuse<br />
more than elucidate. DeFilippis and<br />
Hughes call this “security through<br />
obscurity.” Similarly, Rutgers University<br />
sociologist Ted Goertzel has said<br />
Lott’s work “would never have been<br />
taken seriously if it had not been obscured<br />
by a maze of equations.”<br />
“I have been willing to debate other<br />
academics, and I have done so every<br />
time that I have been asked to do so,”<br />
Lott wrote me in an email. “I have<br />
[asked people] many times to try to<br />
set up debates but it has been very<br />
difficult to get other academics to<br />
participate.”<br />
When DeFilippis debated Lott on a<br />
liberal radio show a few years ago, he<br />
experienced the deluge-of-data technique<br />
firsthand. “You end up getting<br />
into a high-level, technical debate,<br />
which is not going to persuade the lay<br />
audience,” DeFilippis says. “You’re<br />
fighting an uphill battle.”<br />
OUTSIDE OF THE Baylor auditorium,<br />
Lott told me about his journey to<br />
becoming the most prominent and<br />
most hated gun researcher: His interest<br />
in guns, he said, started when he<br />
was an economist at the Wharton<br />
School of the University of Pennsylvania.<br />
Students asked him about his<br />
thoughts on gun control, and so Lott<br />
started researching. He wasn’t a gun<br />
expert then, just an economist. But<br />
he noticed that, despite the volume<br />
of gun research, there were few welldesigned<br />
studies with large sample<br />
sizes. Around the same time, Lott had<br />
become disillusioned with the Clinton<br />
administration. He said he had been a<br />
Democrat, but found himself starting<br />
to align with more-conservative belief<br />
systems. He felt that the response to<br />
the research he’d started doing on<br />
guns encouraged his political transformation.<br />
It appeared to Lott that the<br />
liberal establishment had gotten everything<br />
wrong, and that, in their rush<br />
to prove their progressive fantasies,<br />
they had ignored the facts.<br />
By the time Lott’s first research<br />
came out, he was a researcher at the<br />
University of Chicago. But his new<br />
fascination with guns made him a pariah<br />
there. He says he began receiving<br />
death threats from gun-control advocates,<br />
and so his wife and kids moved<br />
back to Pennsylvania so they wouldn’t<br />
be harmed if one of the threats ever<br />
materialized. Then, Lott says, under<br />
pressure from a gun-conscious mayor,<br />
the university terminated him because<br />
of his pro-gun views. (The University<br />
of Chicago declined to comment on<br />
the specifics of Lott’s departure.)<br />
Lott returned to Pennsylvania and<br />
eventually started the Crime Prevention<br />
Research Center, which is funded<br />
through small donations and operates<br />
with a limited budget. When he flies<br />
around the country giving talks, it’s<br />
with his own money. His lifestyle does<br />
not appear lavish. He seems isolated,<br />
and he seems impassioned—doing this<br />
of his own volition, making a decent<br />
living but not an offensive one. The<br />
Crime Prevention Research Center is<br />
mostly run out of his house, in the suburbs<br />
of Philadelphia. He sleeps little,<br />
because he does his research at night.<br />
Seeing Lott slouching in an uncomfortable,<br />
shiny lounge chair at Baylor<br />
made me wonder why he does this—<br />
when so many of his peers say he’s<br />
wrong, when he’s not being given obscene<br />
amounts of money for his work,<br />
when he’s been essentially banished<br />
from academia, pushed to self-publishing<br />
and creating fake identities to<br />
advance his research.<br />
After half an hour of me trying to<br />
figure out his motivations, Lott said<br />
he’d be late if we talked any longer,<br />
so he got up and opened the double<br />
doors to the auditorium, where he<br />
was introduced by a smiling student<br />
in a suit to a round of applause.<br />
28 MAY/JUNE <strong>2017</strong> • PSMAG.COM
By Malcolm Harris<br />
PHOTOS BY JARREN VINK<br />
Revolutions<br />
Hiding in<br />
Plain Sight<br />
You can find a radical history in even the most<br />
commonplace object. Here are four everyday things<br />
that represent a turn in the way we live.<br />
It’s easy to take the objects around<br />
us for granted, to assume we know<br />
how they came to be, and to forget<br />
the extraordinary roots of ordinary<br />
things. Stories of invention are often<br />
hard to verify because every new<br />
idea stands on the shoulders of older<br />
ones and they make for great urban<br />
legends. Adding to the trouble, some<br />
of the true tales are too good to be<br />
believed, while others are so counterintuitive<br />
as to make you reach for<br />
your Snopes. But the origin stories of<br />
simple household objects sitting in<br />
plain sight can tell us more about the<br />
past (and the present) than we might<br />
imagine. Here are a few unlikely lessons<br />
from handy things.<br />
MAY/JUNE <strong>2017</strong> • PSMAG.COM 29
Transcontinental<br />
Railroad<br />
They say necessity is the mother<br />
of invention, but they don’t say<br />
whose necessity. Conventional<br />
wisdom holds that the American<br />
transcontinental railroad was the<br />
necessary infrastructure for populating<br />
the territories, but some scholarship<br />
has cast doubt on that premise. In<br />
American History class, we learn that<br />
the 19 th -century rail system connected<br />
the country’s territories by increasing<br />
national mobility enough to conquer<br />
the West. In retrospect, it looks like the<br />
only possible solution to the historical<br />
situation. After all, what were we going<br />
to use, boats?<br />
Boats were, in fact, a proposed<br />
alternative solution. Instead of<br />
corporate railroads traveling overland,<br />
some policymakers envisioned<br />
American production linked through a<br />
system of waterways and canals. Canal<br />
expansion was a central part of Henry<br />
Clay’s “American System” proposal,<br />
and had he found his way to the White<br />
House we might be talking about how<br />
boats won the West. In the 1960s,<br />
economic historian Robert Fogel ran<br />
the numbers and argued that, had<br />
we invested in them, canals may have<br />
handled westward expansion just as<br />
well as the rails did. So if it wasn’t<br />
necessity, why the railroads?<br />
While railroads are ordered and<br />
predictable, canals are less so.<br />
Smugglers have a hard time building<br />
their own trains, and tracks generally<br />
go only where they’re supposed to. In<br />
his book Transportation and Revolt:<br />
Pigeons, Mules, Canals, and the<br />
Vanishing Geographies of Subversive<br />
Mobility, Jacob Shell argues that<br />
railroads triumphed over canals in part<br />
because the latter “sparked romantic<br />
associations with gypsies and exotic<br />
races; fearful associations with disease,<br />
smugglers, and criminality; religious<br />
associations with moral depravity and<br />
Satanism; and political associations<br />
with anti-imperial groundswells.” The<br />
fears weren’t totally unfounded: In<br />
1866, a small army reportedly made up<br />
of Irish Americans, Mohawk Indians,<br />
and black Civil War veterans used<br />
boats to invade (not yet independent)<br />
Canada, temporarily seizing Fort Erie.<br />
These militants tried to commandeer<br />
the railroads too, but to no avail.<br />
30 MAY/JUNE <strong>2017</strong> • PSMAG.COM
Bra<br />
There isn’t really any evidence that<br />
feminists in the 1960s actually burned<br />
bras, but the legend has persisted. The<br />
modern bra, though, wasn’t created to<br />
restrain women—it was an invention<br />
that offered both support and<br />
liberation, created by a busty party girl,<br />
for busty party girls. One night in the<br />
early 1910s, young socialite Mary Phelps<br />
Jacob (who went by the name Caresse<br />
Crosby for most of her life) was headed<br />
to an event when—her corset lacking in<br />
danceability and cramping her flapper<br />
style—she MacGyvered a sort of halter<br />
top out of ribbons and handkerchiefs.<br />
Jacob helped her friends out too, and<br />
when she figured out she could make<br />
a real go of it, she applied for a patent<br />
and opened up a small sweatshop (this<br />
was garment manufacturing after all)<br />
as an independent proprietress, rather<br />
than through her husband.<br />
But Jacob didn’t have a lifetime<br />
commitment to being a manufacturer.<br />
Through an ex-boyfriend, she sold<br />
the patent to Warner Brothers Corset<br />
Company (no relation to the movie<br />
guys) for $1,500—a little over $36,000<br />
in today’s buying power. Having rid<br />
herself of the only restraining thing<br />
in her life, Jacob and her husband,<br />
Harry Crosby, moved to Paris for a<br />
while, where they became involved in<br />
the Lost Generation scene. She had<br />
intellectual and romantic affairs with<br />
brilliant weirdos like Henri Cartier-<br />
Bresson and Buckminster Fuller, was<br />
rumored to have ghostwritten erotica<br />
for Henry Miller, and founded an<br />
English-language press that published<br />
many pioneering modernists.<br />
Although inventing the bra was<br />
barely an adolescent pit stop on<br />
Jacob’s glamorous trajectory, it did<br />
suggest what she would get up to<br />
next. Not only would she dance<br />
unencumbered through Europe, but<br />
the patent application was also her first<br />
piece of published writing, wherein she<br />
described the bra’s benefits, “some of<br />
which may be summarized by saying<br />
that it does not confine the person<br />
anywhere except where it is needed.”<br />
MAY/JUNE <strong>2017</strong> • PSMAG.COM 31
Cell Phone<br />
There is no better symbol of late-<br />
20 th -century capitalism than the stock<br />
trader with the bulky cell phone, his<br />
time so valuable that he has to walk<br />
around with a big old antennaed brick<br />
to his ear. How strange, then, that<br />
this technology has its roots in 1950s<br />
Soviet Russia. Detailed Soviet records<br />
are hard to find, but archival material<br />
from Soviet media and industry reports<br />
suggests that the cell phone was, in<br />
part, a communist invention.<br />
Leonid Kupriyanovich was a Moscow<br />
engineer, born in 1929, just as what<br />
had been a feudal empire raced into<br />
modernity at hitherto unseen speeds.<br />
As a young man, Kupriyanovich<br />
tackled a typically Soviet problem:<br />
how to share. According to the Soviet<br />
wire service ANP, Kupriyanovich began<br />
developing radiotelephones that<br />
shared a common base station, based<br />
on the research of his countryman<br />
Dmitry V. Ageev. (Ageev’s work set the<br />
foundation for Code Division Multiple<br />
Access cellular networks, still in use.) It<br />
was a brilliant move, and now we call<br />
those shared base stations cell towers.<br />
The 1961 Soviet cell phone fit in the<br />
palm of the hand and weighed half as<br />
much as today’s iPhone.<br />
The Soviet bureaucracy (in a<br />
characteristic move) prioritized the<br />
use of early cell-phone research for<br />
the development of car phones for<br />
the Soviet upper ranks. Still, according<br />
to the 2014 Russia Telecom and<br />
Broadcasting Equipment Producers<br />
Directory, Kupriyanovich’s “Altay”<br />
radio-based cell network served<br />
emergency-service personnel and<br />
remained in popular use long after the<br />
fall of the U.S.S.R.
Chocolate<br />
Chip Cookie<br />
In an episode of Friends, Lisa Kudrow’s<br />
character claims that her great-greatgrandmother<br />
(“Nestley Toulouse”)<br />
passed down the cookie recipe on the<br />
back of the chocolate-chip bag. As it<br />
happens, a woman did single-handedly<br />
invent chocolate chip cookies, but<br />
she wasn’t from France—she was<br />
from Massachusetts. According to a<br />
popular version of this story, sometime<br />
in the 1930s Ruth Graves Wakefield<br />
was baking chocolate cookies at her<br />
restaurant when, without enough time<br />
to melt the chocolate, Wakefield threw<br />
in whole chunks of a Nestlé bar. People<br />
loved the improvisation, and the rest<br />
is history. But that’s not quite what<br />
happened, according to food historian<br />
Caroline Wyman.<br />
Wakefield wasn’t a distracted<br />
proprietress; she was a well-educated<br />
home economist and chef. In fact,<br />
Wakefield was something closer to<br />
the Martha Stewart of her day, and an<br />
early product of the American publiceducation<br />
system; she graduated from<br />
the Framingham State Normal School<br />
Department of Household Arts in 1924,<br />
two years after the nation’s second<br />
teachers college started issuing<br />
bachelor’s degrees in education. By<br />
the time she invented the chocolate<br />
chip cookie, Wakefield already had a<br />
cookbook: Her Toll House Tried and<br />
True Recipes went through dozens of<br />
printings. (According to the Boston<br />
Globe, the restaurant had never<br />
been a tollhouse—that was just good<br />
branding.)<br />
The cookies became a local delicacy,<br />
and, after soldiers received them in<br />
care packages during World War II, the<br />
adoration went national. The cookies<br />
became so famous that Nestlé started<br />
selling bags of chips—and offered<br />
Wakefield a lifetime of chocolate (and<br />
$1) for a license on the Toll House<br />
name and her recipe.<br />
MAY/JUNE <strong>2017</strong> • PSMAG.COM 33
EXTENDED PROFILES<br />
Read feature-length<br />
entries for every 30 under<br />
30 honoree throughout<br />
the month of May:<br />
psmag.com
THE<br />
30<br />
TOP<br />
THINKERS<br />
UNDER<br />
30<br />
This year’s most<br />
exciting young<br />
thinkers and<br />
advocates in policy<br />
and social justice.<br />
by Avital Andrews<br />
& Rosie Spinks<br />
3-D ILLUSTRATION BY COMRADE<br />
Most people don’t know that Louis Braille developed his reading<br />
system for the blind by the time he was 16 years old, or that<br />
Joan of Arc led France to military victory when she was 17.<br />
Blaise Pascal invented the calculator at 19. Albert Einstein published<br />
his theory of special relativity at 26. Young people having<br />
big ideas is a very old tradition.<br />
Yet you can’t run for president of the United States, or even<br />
vice president, until you’re 35. (Remember: It’s popularly believed<br />
that Jesus was crucified at 33.) You have to be at least 30<br />
to be a U.S. senator, and at least 25 to be a representative (for<br />
comparison, King Tut’s reign lasted from when he was about<br />
nine to his death at around 19).<br />
More than one-third of Americans are younger than 30, while<br />
zero—zero—federal lawmakers are. The average age of our sitting<br />
Congress is 58.5, a glaring demonstration of how grossly<br />
underrepresented our young people are in halls of power—a<br />
travesty to anyone who has spent any time surveying the landscape<br />
of our brightest citizens in their teens and twenties.<br />
You might think that the most difficult task while culling the<br />
honorees for <strong>Pacific</strong> <strong>Standard</strong>’s annual 30 under 30 list is to<br />
sleuth out young powerhouse intellectuals who are poised to<br />
shape society’s coming ideas. You’d be wrong. It is, rather, to<br />
narrow down the massive field of qualified candidates, and the<br />
avalanche of knockout nominations, we receive each year.<br />
There are simply so many young people whose caliber of<br />
thought and devotion to action outstrip by far the vast majority<br />
of the older population. Their mental acuity, stamina, and optimism<br />
more than make up for their lack of experience.<br />
In fact, their inexperience is often crucial to what they end up<br />
getting done: More than a few of this year’s crop of phenomenal<br />
thinkers openly attribute their intrepidness to their naivete.<br />
They credit the folly of youth with having taken on what they<br />
did. Some even say, in retrospect, that if they’d known then what<br />
they know now, they wouldn’t have attempted what they did.<br />
Many of the young people we interviewed told us that having<br />
an underrepresented identity is what motivates them to do<br />
what they do. Some of the people on our list, like the Mexican<br />
White House staffer who mentors young Latinas, are deliberately<br />
making themselves visible to the next generation. As Marian<br />
Wright Edelman, longtime champion for young people, has<br />
said, “You can’t be what you can’t see.”<br />
There are also people on our list whose brains literally work<br />
differently—whether because of autism, or for other reasons.<br />
(Alan Turing, thought by some to have been on the spectrum,<br />
was 27 when he built the computing machine that broke Nazi<br />
codes—suggesting that neurodiversity can be crucial to solving<br />
the world’s scariest problems.)<br />
On a personal note, I’ll add that every year when I tell people<br />
I’m working on this project, some ask, “Isn’t that depressing?”<br />
They mean, I think, that it must be disheartening to focus on<br />
people who have accomplished so much so young, while we<br />
common older folk (I am, let’s say, past 30) live our commoner,<br />
older lives.<br />
“Depressing?” I reply. “No. The opposite.”<br />
It’s inspiring. It gives me faith for the future. And it’s an honor<br />
to shine this spotlight. We need to be celebrating young superstars<br />
in realms besides entertainment so that even younger<br />
people can aspire even higher.<br />
Rather than be intimidated by the 30 up-and-comers on<br />
<strong>Pacific</strong> <strong>Standard</strong>’s <strong>2017</strong> list, we should take their existence as a<br />
needed sign that everything might, after all, turn out OK.<br />
—AVITAL ANDREWS
Dafne Almazán, 15<br />
CHILD PSYCHOLOGY<br />
At 15 years old, Dafne Almazán is Mexico’s youngest child<br />
psychologist. She finished elementary school at seven,<br />
high school by 10, undergraduate work by 13, and will<br />
finish her master’s degree at the Monterrey Institute of<br />
Technology and High Studies at the age of just 16.<br />
Perhaps more striking than this slew of accomplishments<br />
is the passion Almazán brings to her work with gifted<br />
students at Mexico’s Centro de Atención al Talento, which<br />
translates to the Talent Attention Center, where Almazán<br />
works to make sure that special talents don’t go untapped.<br />
“I see it as a social duty to my country to help its talent<br />
to thrive,” Almazán says. “I have a goal of creating an<br />
adequate education option for gifted students.” —RS<br />
36 MAY/JUNE <strong>2017</strong> • PSMAG.COM 3 0 U N D E R 3 0<br />
Lily S. Axelrod, 29<br />
IMMIGRATION LAW<br />
Lily S. Axelrod grew up attuned to the concerns of American<br />
immigrants: Her paternal grandmother fled violence against<br />
Jews in Poland and came to the U.S. in the 1920s. “I became<br />
committed to the idea that America is a country of refuge,<br />
and that in every generation we benefit from the diversity<br />
and ambition of newcomers.” Now, after graduating cum<br />
laude from Harvard Law School, she’s an immigration lawyer<br />
who focuses on deportation defense—which largely involves<br />
getting her clients out of immigration detention and keeping<br />
their families united in the U.S. Axelrod has a long-term<br />
goal of “untangling the immigration bureaucracy from the<br />
criminal justice system” and helping bring “an absolute end<br />
to immigration detention.” —RS<br />
Jacob Barnett, 18<br />
PHYSICS<br />
When Jacob Barnett was two years old, doctors told his<br />
mother Kristine that he would probably never be able to<br />
talk, read, or even tie his shoes. He had moderate to severe<br />
autism, they informed her. So Kristine started teaching<br />
him herself, focusing on his passion for math and science.<br />
Suddenly, at age three, he spoke four languages and could<br />
answer complicated astrophysics questions, even though<br />
no one had taught him the subject matter.<br />
At 10, he was officially a college student. At 13, he was<br />
a published physicist and soon became the youngest<br />
student ever admitted to the Perimeter Institute, where<br />
his mentor and adviser is Lee Smolin, the famous physicist<br />
who has been called a “necessary troublemaker.” —AA<br />
Tamma Carleton, 29<br />
ENVIRONMENTAL ECONOMICS<br />
Tamma Carleton is a Ph.D. candidate in agricultural and<br />
resource economics at the University of California–Berkeley.<br />
She’s also been a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University and<br />
the recipient of the Environmental Protection Agency’s<br />
Science to Achieve Results Fellowship. In her research,<br />
Carleton combines social and physical data with statistical<br />
models to assess how issues such as climate change and<br />
freshwater scarcity affect poverty and economic growth.<br />
“As the human environmental footprint takes on a<br />
global scale, I feel that each day I have two choices. One<br />
is to shrink back from this problem. The other is to do<br />
everything I can to try to inform solutions,” Carleton says.<br />
“Most days, I choose the latter.” —RS<br />
Sean Chen, 26<br />
URBAN PLANNING<br />
A city planner and economist, Sean Chen is currently a<br />
fellow with the Army Corps of Engineers as part of the<br />
Scholars in the Nation’s Service Initiative at Princeton<br />
University. His work at the corps’ Institute for Water<br />
Resources centers on evaluating the economic and social<br />
benefits of various engineering projects, as well as working<br />
on innovative solutions to improve public decision-making<br />
through green infrastructure.<br />
“On one hand, I want to contribute to the underlying<br />
theory and understanding of cities as social systems,” he<br />
says. “On the other hand, there is a lot to be done actually on<br />
the ground. If I can one day visit a place and say that I helped<br />
make it a more livable and beautiful place, I’ll be happy.” —RS<br />
PHOTOS COURTESY CAITLIN DONOVAN, ED RUBIN & PRINCETON ALUMNI WEEKLY
June Eric-Udorie, 18<br />
GENDER ACTIVISM<br />
A writer and activist for girls’ and women’s rights, June<br />
Eric-Udorie was born in Dublin to Nigerian parents and<br />
was subsequently brought up in Nigeria, the United<br />
Kingdom, and Ireland. In childhood, she heard stories<br />
about her grandmother’s decision to protect her mother<br />
from the practice of female genital mutilation, or FGM,<br />
and was inspired to a life of activism. Now, at just 18,<br />
she’s written about FGM and other gender rights-related<br />
topics for major publications including the Guardian,<br />
New Statesman, Fusion, and others, and she is editing an<br />
anthology of essays due to be published in the spring. At<br />
the moment, she’s an editorial trainee at Penguin Random<br />
House U.K. —RS<br />
Cristina Flores, 26<br />
POLITICS<br />
Yvonne Dean-Bailey, 21<br />
STATE POLITICS<br />
In 2015, Yvonne Dean-Bailey was the youngest Republican<br />
woman to be elected to the New Hampshire House of<br />
Representatives, where she also serves as vice chairman of<br />
the Election Law Committee.<br />
Since New Hampshire State House members serve parttime,<br />
most have a day job as well. Dean-Bailey works for a<br />
company that carries out direct-marketing campaigns for<br />
candidates, non-profits, and small businesses. Dean-Bailey<br />
sees the opportunity to serve her state as an immense<br />
opportunity and responsibility.<br />
“I love my state and I want to preserve the best parts<br />
about it: our natural beauty, economic and social freedom,<br />
and the sense of community,” Dean-Bailey says. —RS<br />
As a child, Cristina Flores dreamed of becoming president<br />
and, at 26, she already has four years of experience<br />
working for the White House. She interned in the office<br />
of the First Lady, and later served as the White House’s<br />
associate director of Hispanic media. Flores was also part<br />
of the White House’s advance team, working directly with<br />
Joe and Jill Biden. Incredibly, Flores has held an additional<br />
full-time job throughout all this.<br />
Today, she is the National Women’s Business Council’s<br />
marketing and engagement manager, overseeing<br />
the federal advisory council’s communication and<br />
digital media strategy, as well as engaging with all its<br />
stakeholders—a role she has held since 2016. —AA<br />
Rebecca Garcia, 26<br />
COMPUTER LITERACY<br />
Rebecca Garcia is a coder, activist, and co-founder of<br />
the non-profit CoderDojo NYC, where she teaches young<br />
people aged seven to 17 coding skills.<br />
Before founding CoderDojo NYC, Garcia worked for<br />
Squarespace and as a developer at DoSomething, a<br />
non-profit focused on youth and social change. She also<br />
currently serves as the program manager at Microsoft’s<br />
Tech Jobs Academy, which helps underrepresented<br />
New Yorkers get into the IT profession. Garcia describes<br />
herself as having a “never-ending amount of curiosity”<br />
and says that all her work will be a success if the diversity<br />
conversation at the world’s top technology firms becomes<br />
obsolete. —RS<br />
Yaa Gyasi, 27<br />
LITERATURE<br />
When Yaa Gyasi was two years old, she moved with her<br />
parents and two brothers from Mampong, Ghana, to the U.S.<br />
Her debut novel, Homegoing, took seven years to finish. By<br />
the time it was done, the manuscript had sparked a bidding<br />
contest among 10 book publishers, with Knopf winning the<br />
sale with an offer of over $1 million. It was a good purchase:<br />
Homegoing was a New York Times bestseller for nine weeks.<br />
Gyasi wrote Homegoing, in part, while she was a<br />
graduate student at the prestigious Iowa Writers’<br />
Workshop. Before that, she was an undergraduate at<br />
Stanford University, majoring in English with an emphasis<br />
on creative writing. “I hope my books continue to expand<br />
ideas of what is possible in fiction,” she says. —AA<br />
3 0 U N D E R 3 0<br />
MAY/JUNE <strong>2017</strong> • PSMAG.COM 37<br />
PHOTO COURTESY CHERYL BARNHART
Jewell Jones, 22<br />
STATE POLITICS<br />
In last November’s election, Jewell Jones made history<br />
as the youngest person ever elected to the Michigan<br />
State House of Representatives, beating his Republican<br />
opponent with 64 percent of the vote.<br />
Jewell serves Michigan’s 11 th State House District—a<br />
constituency that comprises roughly 63,000 people. “I<br />
think making history, showing young people that it is<br />
possible—that is my proudest achievement,” Jones says.<br />
“Showing young people that it is critical to get off the<br />
sidelines and get involved. Showing young people that we<br />
are the generation of change.”<br />
Focusing on his term ahead, Jones hopes to foster and<br />
implement more youth-driven ideas in the community. —RS<br />
38 MAY/JUNE <strong>2017</strong> • PSMAG.COM 3 0 U N D E R 3 0<br />
Cody Karutz, 29<br />
FILM & VIRTUAL REALITY<br />
Cody Karutz is the founder and creative director of Blue<br />
Trot, a company that uses academic research to create<br />
compelling environmental education. He spent six years<br />
doing research at Stanford University’s Virtual Human<br />
Interaction Lab. Today, he creates and designs direct-media<br />
experiences (using both virtual and augmented reality)<br />
that tell stories about the environment. Karutz’s directorial<br />
debut and educational virtual reality experience, The<br />
Crystal Reef, premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2016.<br />
“It seems paradoxical that we need a digital screen<br />
to make us feel closer to nature,” Karutz says, “but that<br />
is part of what it will take for us to make significant<br />
environmental behavior change.” —RS<br />
Michael Li, 19<br />
NEUROSCIENCE<br />
Now a freshman at Princeton, Michael Li has already been a<br />
finalist in the Intel Science Talent Search in 2016, one of the<br />
nation’s most revered pre-collegiate science competitions.<br />
For his project, Li developed a statistical model that<br />
studies how neurons in the part of the brain involved in<br />
sensory processing—known as the posterior parietal cortex,<br />
or PPC—engage in complex decision-making.<br />
Down the line, Li says, this kind of research could be<br />
applied to advancing the treatment of degenerative<br />
neurological diseases.<br />
Li is also interested in the field of machine learning—<br />
“how we can apply our understanding of brain processes<br />
to developing intelligent machines.” —RS<br />
Bernadette Lim, 22<br />
MEDICINE & GENDER-RIGHTS ACTIVISM<br />
Bernadette Lim is the founder of Women SPEAK, an<br />
international women’s empowerment organization based<br />
in Los Angeles, which cultivates mentorship among young<br />
women. Since its founding in 2014, Women SPEAK has<br />
founded more than 20 chapters across the world, serving<br />
more than 750 young women. Lim is also currently a<br />
Fulbright scholar in Pune, India, where she is researching<br />
the gender disparities among health-care workers. In <strong>2017</strong>,<br />
she will attend medical school with a plan to specialize in<br />
obstetrics and gynecology. Over the long term, Lim plans<br />
to serve as an OB/GYN physician in underserved areas in<br />
the U.S., and says her ideal future involves a blend of health<br />
policy and entrepreneurship. —RS<br />
Sara Minkara, 27<br />
PUBLIC POLICY & ACTIVISM<br />
Sara Minkara knows what it’s like to be perceived as different.<br />
As a blind person and a Muslim-American woman, she has<br />
spent her entire life having to work harder than others,<br />
an experience that led the 27-year-old Minkara to start<br />
Empowerment Through Integration, or ETI. She has made<br />
it her mission to ensure that blind and impaired children all<br />
over the world “feel they have the right to dictate how their<br />
life goes.” Minkara, who earned a master’s in public policy<br />
at Harvard University in 2014, also runs “dining in the dark”<br />
events, where participants can question their preconceived<br />
ideas about sightlessness. “We have broken a lot of<br />
misconceptions surrounding what blind people can do and<br />
shown that blindness can be a tool to uncover abilities.” —RS<br />
PHOTOS COURTESY KIT KARUTZ, MICHAEL LI & THE CREATIVITY FOUNDATION
Tamara Patton, 28<br />
NUCLEAR DISARMAMENT<br />
As a Ph.D. student in the Woodrow Wilson School of<br />
Public and International Affairs at Princeton, Tamara<br />
Patton studies arms control and disarmament issues, with<br />
a particular focus on the role that virtual reality can play<br />
in verification. Her interest in the topic was piqued when<br />
she studied under Ambassador Thomas Graham Jr. at the<br />
University of Washington.<br />
Nuclear disarmament is always an important topic,<br />
but the issue feels newly relevant in <strong>2017</strong> given<br />
rising nationalism and a possible realignment among<br />
superpowers. As Patton sees it, disarmament remains an<br />
issue on which “human civilization quite literally hangs in<br />
the balance.” —RS<br />
Alexander Peysakhovich, 29<br />
BEHAVIORAL ECONOMICS<br />
Daquan Oliver, 25<br />
ENTREPRENEURSHIP & ACTIVISM<br />
Daquan Oliver is the founder of WeThrive, a non-profit that<br />
sends undergraduate students to run entrepreneurship<br />
programs in under-resourced communities. It was<br />
something that Oliver had planned to do since he was<br />
a teenager growing up with a single mother in a lowincome<br />
area. At the end of his undergraduate career at<br />
Babson College, Oliver had earned a pile of awards, and<br />
the Clinton Foundation named him to its list of Five Black<br />
Student Leaders to Watch in 2014. Now, at WeThrive,<br />
participants create business ventures while gaining the life<br />
skills and positive habits that Oliver believes will help them<br />
throughout their personal and professional lives. “One of the<br />
philosophies I live by is embracing chaos,” Oliver says. —RS<br />
Alexander Peysakhovich is a scientist in Facebook’s<br />
artificial intelligence research lab as well as a prolific<br />
scholar with a Ph.D. from Harvard, where he won a teaching<br />
award. He has also published articles in the New York<br />
Times, Wired, and several prestigious academic journals.<br />
Peysakhovich’s interdisciplinary work is driven by his<br />
deep interest in understanding decision-making—both<br />
human and machine—and by his desire to figure out how<br />
artificial intelligence can improve our decision-making<br />
processes. Making good decisions, as Peysakhovich sees it,<br />
is all about “building more-accurate representations of the<br />
world.” If we imbue machines with this ability, he believes,<br />
it will empower us humans to make smarter decisions. —AA<br />
Sam Pressler, 24<br />
PSYCHOLOGY & PERFORMING ARTS<br />
As an undergraduate at the College of William & Mary,<br />
Sam Pressler founded the school’s Center for Veterans<br />
Engagement. Today he’s the founder and executive<br />
director of the Armed Services Arts Partnership, where<br />
Pressler makes sure that the veterans he works with—<br />
many of whom deal with post-traumatic stress disorder,<br />
brain injuries, anxiety, depression, and other post-war<br />
difficulties—have the resources and guidance they need to<br />
write comic, literary, or musical pieces about their wartime<br />
and homecoming experiences.<br />
“The arts,” he explains, “do not just support veterans as<br />
they come home from war—they also help civilians learn<br />
how to welcome our veterans home.” —AA<br />
Jesse Reising, 27<br />
LAW & EDUCATION<br />
After undergraduate work at Yale University and a J.D. from<br />
Harvard Law, Jesse Reising is now a federal prosecutor in<br />
the Department of Justice’s antitrust division. He’s also<br />
co-founder of the Warrior-Scholar Project, a non-profit that<br />
gives veterans who are first-time college students a free<br />
two-week course to ensure subsequent academic success.<br />
In his final season playing football for Yale, Reising<br />
sustained a neck injury that left his right arm mostly<br />
paralyzed and dashed his hopes of being a Marine. Founding<br />
WSP, he says, came from his desire “to serve those serving in<br />
the military in my place.” WSP has already helped more than<br />
500 veterans. “Education can help harness veterans’ patriotic<br />
energy in ways that improve our nation,” Reising says. —AA<br />
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PHOTO COURTESY MELANIE STETSON FREEMAN/THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR
Victoria M. Rodríguez-Roldán, 28<br />
TRANSGENDER ACTIVISM<br />
Victoria M. Rodríguez-Roldán came out as a transgender<br />
woman in her teens and was diagnosed with bipolar<br />
disorder in her mid-20s. Now a graduate of the University<br />
of Maine School of Law, she works on behalf of trans and<br />
gender-non-conforming people in her role as Trans/GNC<br />
Justice Project director at the National LGBTQ Task Force,<br />
where she focuses her policy efforts on “the intersection<br />
between disability, mental health, and trans identity.”<br />
She works on engaging with policymakers throughout<br />
Congress and various government agencies to help promote<br />
policies that will benefit the trans community. “Let me tell<br />
you, you do not get used to seeing [injustice],” she says, “and<br />
that’s a good thing. You can’t let your heart go numb.” —RS<br />
40 MAY/JUNE <strong>2017</strong> • PSMAG.COM 3 0 U N D E R 3 0<br />
Aviva Rosman, 28<br />
VOTER MOBILIZATION<br />
After a four-year stint with Teach for America and a master’s<br />
degree in public policy at the University of Chicago, Aviva<br />
Rosman co-founded BallotReady in 2015, a non-partisan<br />
online guide to political races and referendums in the U.S.<br />
BallotReady’s mission is to make it easier for voters to make<br />
informed choices throughout an entire ballot, not just the<br />
top-ballot race that gets the most media coverage. In 2016’s<br />
elections, BallotReady offered guidance in 12 states and<br />
the District of Columbia, covering about 15,000 candidates<br />
and 300 referendums. Indeed, research conducted with<br />
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology showed that, in<br />
Kentucky’s 2015 general election, eligible voters who used<br />
BallotReady were 20 percent more likely to vote. —RS<br />
Annie Ryu, 26<br />
SOCIAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP<br />
Annie Ryu graduated summa cum laude from Harvard.<br />
Now, the 26-year-old social entrepreneur’s life centers<br />
around jackfruit, a large, green, studded fruit native<br />
to Southeast Asia. In the face of climate change, the<br />
fruit’s nutritional properties make it a viable (and more<br />
sustainable) alternative to imperiled staple crops like<br />
wheat and corn—as well as a popular meat substitute.<br />
The exotic-fruit-based career path came as something<br />
of a surprise, but, as Ryu sees it, “replacing meat with a<br />
fruit that grows on trees, is superabundant, thrives without<br />
agricultural inputs, and is nutritious and satisfying to the<br />
consumer—this is a fundamentally scalable solution to<br />
multiple global problems.” —RS<br />
Hannah Safford, 25<br />
ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY<br />
After her undergraduate degree in chemical engineering at<br />
Princeton, Hannah Safford spent two years as a fellow in the<br />
White House Office of Science and Technology Policy—a<br />
job she began at just 22 years old—where she took on tasks<br />
like organizing the first-ever White House Water Summit,<br />
which brought together more than a hundred experts in<br />
water policy and innovation. Safford’s next step is a Ph.D.<br />
in environmental engineering, which she’ll begin in the fall.<br />
“Recycling bottles and driving less is all well and good, but,<br />
at the end of the day, tackling big problems like climate<br />
change requires behavioral and technological shifts on a<br />
much larger scale,” Safford says. “Thoughtful government<br />
helps these shifts occur successfully.” —RS<br />
Erin Schrode, 26<br />
POLITICS & ENVIRONMENTALISM<br />
Erin Schrode is an accomplished activist, writer, and<br />
corporate adviser, but her 2016 run for Congress is her<br />
proudest accomplishment. “I’ve never done something<br />
where I felt more relevant, where I felt I could make a<br />
greater impact,” she says. Though she didn’t win, Schrode<br />
received nearly 21,000 votes in California’s Second<br />
Congressional District, running on a platform of climate<br />
action and social justice. Most recently, Schrode went with<br />
filmmaker Josh Fox to Standing Rock in North Dakota. “It’s<br />
the fight of our time,” Schrode says. “It’s about climate<br />
change, national security, Native sovereignty. It’s about<br />
the potential contamination of 17 million people’s drinking<br />
water. It’s not a matter of if but when it’ll burst.” —AA<br />
PHOTO COURTESY KATHERINE ELGIN PHOTOGRAPHY
Boyan Slat, 22<br />
ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE<br />
Boyan Slat, founder of the non-profit The Ocean Cleanup,<br />
estimates that it’ll cost several hundred million dollars to<br />
get the trash out of the world’s oceans. He also predicts<br />
that, if the plastic that’s collected is sold to recyclers, it<br />
would go for more than $500 million. “This is more than<br />
the plan would cost to execute,” he points out. “In other<br />
words, it’s profitable.”<br />
His proudest accomplishment so far, he says, is his<br />
328-foot-long North Sea Prototype, which he deployed last<br />
year off the Netherlands, anchoring it with cables nearly<br />
three miles long. It’s still being tested, but if it works—and<br />
it looks like it might—a more extensive pilot system will be<br />
set up in waters in the <strong>Pacific</strong> later this year. —AA<br />
Thomas Tasche, 26<br />
INTERNATIONAL POLICY & POLITICAL ECONOMICS<br />
Peng Shi, 29<br />
DATA SCIENCE<br />
A soon-to-be tenure-track faculty member in data science<br />
at the University of Southern California’s Marshall School<br />
of Business, Peng Shi holds a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts<br />
Institute of Technology. His work uses data modeling to help<br />
make the global marketplace more efficient and equitable.<br />
“If you design the right rules that govern a marketplace—<br />
despite self-seeking behavior from participants—the overall<br />
outcome can still be good for society,” Shi says.<br />
Shi moved from China to Canada at the age of 11 and<br />
says the biggest change was being exposed to Christianity.<br />
“When I was around 13, I became a Christian, being the first<br />
in my family to make this decision, and this has profoundly<br />
influenced my values, goals, and perspectives.” —RS<br />
Before pursuing his master’s in public affairs at the<br />
Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton, Thomas Tasche<br />
was a policy advisor at both the European Bank for<br />
Reconstruction and Development and at the Department<br />
of the Treasury. Though he is a social scientist, Tasche<br />
describes his approach to research as “omnivorous.”<br />
His thesis on Chinese investment in the Caribbean was<br />
awarded the Lieutenant John A. Larkin Memorial Prize—<br />
which recognizes the best thesis in the field of political<br />
economy—for its examination of the superpower’s<br />
activities in less-prominent corners of the globe. It’s a<br />
topic that seems to suit Tasche’s belief that expected<br />
paths of research aren’t the most instructive. —RS<br />
Alexis Toliver, 23<br />
NEUROSCIENCE & PUBLIC POLICY<br />
Alexis Toliver is a neurobiology researcher at Harvard<br />
Medical School and co-founder of the Harriet Tubman<br />
Collective, a group of black disabled activists. Her brain<br />
research has been useful in helping people who’ve had a<br />
stroke regain their ability to walk. Toliver is also autistic,<br />
and has dealt with depression and social anxiety.<br />
“I am a black, disabled woman who fights for all forms<br />
of justice,” she says. Eventually, Toliver plans to go to<br />
graduate school to study autism.<br />
Most of Toliver’s advocacy these days deals with<br />
the fact that “disabled folks are systemically silenced,<br />
murdered by police, electrocuted, stigmatized, and<br />
constantly subjected to violence by the able-bodied.” —AA<br />
Anthony Lee Zhang, 23<br />
ECONOMICS<br />
As an undergraduate at the University of Chicago, Anthony<br />
Lee Zhang planned to become a biochemist, just like his<br />
father. But a course in economics with Glen Weyl changed<br />
his mind. Zhang switched majors, graduating with a<br />
bachelor’s degree in economics and snagging a prize along<br />
the way: the Becker Friedman Institute Award for Academic<br />
Achievement in Microeconomics, given annually to the<br />
University of Chicago’s best microeconomics student.<br />
Zhang then spent a year doing data science for<br />
Facebook’s analytics group. Today, Zhang is at Stanford,<br />
getting his Ph.D. in economic analysis and policy. In the<br />
meantime, Zhang isn’t just Weyl’s protege—he’s also his<br />
co-author. —AA<br />
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PHOTOS COURTESY CHARIS LOH PHOTOGRAPHY & KATHERINE ELGIN PHOTOGRAPHY
These visionaries did some of their most<br />
important work after retirement—proving that<br />
you’re never too old to make a difference.<br />
by Avital Andrews<br />
3-D ILLUSTRATION BY COMRADE<br />
If you think that change-making is just for young people, these six revolutionaries<br />
will change your mind. Each is at least 80 years old, and each has postretirement<br />
accomplishments more spectacular than most people’s life’s work.<br />
They’re part of the gray-haired “encore movement,” a wave of elders who are using<br />
their golden years to do potent social justice work. Though older people are<br />
still undervalued—for Americans, ageism deepens with each birthday—these<br />
post-career octogenarians and nonagenarians have made themselves crucial<br />
to the communities they serve, proving the value and power of a late-life pivot.
KITTY<br />
WILLIAMS<br />
92<br />
G.COM C H A N G I N G T H E W O R L D A F T E R 8 0<br />
BETTY<br />
TAYLOR<br />
91<br />
BETTY TAYLOR grew up in<br />
Kentucky and Illinois wanting to be<br />
a teacher, then went on to teach<br />
high school and college English for<br />
about 20 years while raising two<br />
children. During a sabbatical, she<br />
migrated west to Eugene, Oregon,<br />
for a year; two years later, she<br />
returned to complete a doctorate<br />
from the University of Oregon.<br />
After retirement, in 1996, Taylor<br />
ran for Eugene’s city council. Today,<br />
she’s in her sixth term, at the end<br />
of which she’ll have represented<br />
Eugene’s Second Ward for 24 years.<br />
“I’ve always been concerned<br />
about injustice,” Taylor says. Perhaps<br />
her most enduring legacy is helping<br />
to save the Amazon headwaters, a<br />
local wetland that was in danger of<br />
being developed until 2014, after<br />
Taylor successfully advocated for<br />
the council to buy and preserve<br />
26 critical acres. She’s currently<br />
supporting a resolution against oil<br />
trains passing through Eugene.<br />
When asked whether she<br />
faces age discrimination, Taylor<br />
says: “Attitudes are sometimes<br />
condescending, but no. People<br />
like it that I’m old. Because they’ree<br />
getting old too, and they want to<br />
think they can still do something.”<br />
KITTY WILLIAMS is now a public<br />
speaker who travels widely, but,<br />
in the 1920s, hers was the only<br />
Jewish family in Sáránd, Hungary.<br />
At 19, she was herded onto a train<br />
for Auschwitz with her dad, who<br />
was sent to the gas chamber the<br />
day they arrived.<br />
When the American liberators<br />
came, Williams fell in love with one,<br />
an Air Force pilot, and followed<br />
him home. On the train to Iowa,<br />
“He asked me if I would do him a<br />
favor,” she remembers, “and not talk<br />
about the Holocaust or tell anyone<br />
I was Jewish”—for her own safety.<br />
Williams was shocked but complied,<br />
even baptizing their three kids.<br />
Her husband, an alcoholic,<br />
abandoned the family, leaving<br />
Williams a destitute single mother<br />
in 1950s Iowa. Having begun as<br />
a teller at State Bank and Trust,<br />
Williams worked her way up to vice<br />
president, but her salary remained<br />
less than half that of her male<br />
counterparts. Ahead of her second<br />
marriage, Williams revealed her true<br />
identity to her new fiancé. “That’s<br />
when I ‘came out’ and got involved<br />
with the Jewish community,” she<br />
says. The Institute for Holocaust<br />
Education invited her to join its<br />
speakers’ bureau, and now she<br />
tells her Holocaust story in schools,<br />
churches, and libraries—“It’s kind of<br />
mushrooming,” she says of her new<br />
role as orator. Today, Williams has<br />
new purpose. “Old age isn’t easy,”<br />
she says, “but I’m still here.”<br />
WILHELMINA<br />
PERRY<br />
82<br />
WILHELMINA PERRY started LGBT<br />
Faith Leaders of African Descent<br />
in 2010. The non-profit works<br />
to reduce homophobia in the<br />
Christian black community, helps<br />
ministers learn how to reach LGBT<br />
African Americans, and provides a<br />
judgment-free haven for homeless<br />
gay youth of color.<br />
Perry grew up in Harlem, went<br />
to college, got a Ph.D., and became<br />
a social worker, then a professor<br />
of social work. Though she had<br />
always been attracted to women,<br />
Perry married and divorced<br />
two men before identifying as a<br />
lesbian. While teaching at San<br />
Diego State University, she fell in<br />
love with a fellow faculty member,<br />
Antonia Pantoja, a recipient of the<br />
Presidential Medal of Freedom for<br />
her activism on behalf of Latino<br />
civil rights. “Ours was really a love<br />
story,” Perry says of their 30-year<br />
partnership.<br />
After Pantoja died in 2002,<br />
Perry felt lost and found herself<br />
contemplating suicide. Then, after a<br />
50-year absence, she stepped back<br />
into a church. “It saved my life, ” she<br />
says. Perry credits her spryness to<br />
six decades of vegetarianism—and<br />
spending time with young people.<br />
M S
ESTELLA<br />
PYFROM<br />
80<br />
CONNY<br />
CARUSO<br />
86<br />
ESTELLA PYFROM worked as an<br />
educator for 50 years, teaching<br />
every age from kindergarten<br />
through 12 th grade. The children<br />
she taught came from families as<br />
poor as her own. “When I started<br />
thinking of retirement,” Pyfrom<br />
says, “I knew there were still a<br />
lot of services that needed to be<br />
provided.” She was especially<br />
concerned about the digital divide:<br />
Most of her students didn’t have<br />
computer or Internet access. “I<br />
wanted to provide them with 21 st -<br />
century learning,” she says, “and<br />
came up with the idea of a bus<br />
because it was big enough, it could<br />
get me out into the community—<br />
and I could drive it.”<br />
Pyfrom used her retirement<br />
money to buy and customize a<br />
bus and outfit it with computers,<br />
creating a mobile classroom that<br />
she called Estella’s Brilliant Bus;<br />
since 2012, she’s been out on the<br />
road with it, helping underserved<br />
communities.<br />
After Pyfrom was named a CNN<br />
Hero, big donors took notice—<br />
Microsoft now gives computers,<br />
and Office Depot provides<br />
technology support, computers,<br />
and financial contributions.<br />
The years aren’t slowing Pyfrom,<br />
who sleeps only four hours a night.<br />
“I’m blessed,” she says. “I feel good<br />
every day. A lot of your age is in<br />
your mind. Just because you’re<br />
getting older doesn’t mean you<br />
can’t still make a difference.”<br />
JAIME<br />
YRASTORZA<br />
86<br />
JAIME YRASTORZA was born in the<br />
Philippines. When he was 10, just<br />
hours after Pearl Harbor, Japan<br />
bombed the Philippines, then a<br />
United States colony. The U.S.<br />
surrendered, beginning a threeyear<br />
Japanese occupation, by the<br />
end of which Yrastorza’s mother<br />
and sister were dead and his father<br />
was on the run. Determined to<br />
forge a better life, he applied to<br />
American colleges and got into the<br />
University of Minnesota–Duluth. He<br />
studied dentistry, married a nurse,<br />
had five kids, moved to Colorado,<br />
and worked as a maxillofacial<br />
surgeon for 35 years.<br />
In his late 50s, Yrastorza<br />
joined a charity trip to Ecuador<br />
to operate on children with cleft<br />
lips and palates; upon his return,<br />
he decided to do similar work i<br />
the Philippines. In 1989, Yras za<br />
took a small group of surgeo<br />
to<br />
the Philippines to fix Filipino kids’<br />
deformities, inaugurating a n<br />
profit called Uplift Internatio e<br />
that he still shepherds today. fa<br />
Uplift Internationale’s volunt s<br />
have performed about 1,000<br />
bono surgeries (Yrastorza ha<br />
personally done about 100), stl<br />
on preschoolers.<br />
CONNY CARUSO had left her<br />
job as an executive assistant in<br />
the entertainment industry. Her<br />
memoir, Foothold in the Mountain,<br />
had just been published. During<br />
a book signing, someone in the<br />
audience called out, “What’s your<br />
next project?” Without thinking,<br />
she answered, “I’m going to pay it<br />
forward.” Except she didn’t know<br />
how. Soon after, she read a Los<br />
Angeles Times story about Father<br />
Gregory Boyle and his Homeboy<br />
Industries, which employs and<br />
educates former gang members.<br />
“I went down there,” Caruso<br />
remembers. “My homies opened<br />
the door for me, and I said: ‘Oh<br />
my God. Heaven isn’t up there. It’s<br />
right here.’ I haven’t left since.”<br />
Now, besides raising money,<br />
organizing events, and getting<br />
Hollywood bigwigs involved with<br />
Homeboy Industries, Caruso spends<br />
hours each week with reformed<br />
ex-convicts. “I love them,” she says.<br />
“They’re divine human beings.” The<br />
felons call her mama. She joins them<br />
for therapy, recovery meetings, and<br />
meditation. She encourages them,<br />
yells at them, hugs them.<br />
“You get kids who’ve had the<br />
most horrendous lives—they<br />
were treated like worms in the<br />
woodwork,” Caruso says. “If you<br />
meet them today, there’s nothing<br />
but love and trust. People ask<br />
me: ‘Aren’t you afraid? These are<br />
ous people.’ I say: ‘Are you<br />
ding? They’re afraid of me<br />
C H A N G I N G T H E W O R L D A F T E R<br />
0
THE<br />
F ALLAC Y<br />
OF
y<br />
CHRISTOPHER KETCHAM<br />
photos by Alejandro Durán
is the unifying faith of industrial civilization.<br />
That it is nonsensical in the<br />
extreme, a deluded fantasy, doesn’t<br />
appear to bother us. We hear the holy<br />
truth in the decrees of elected officials,<br />
in the laments of economists<br />
about flagging GDP, in the authoritative<br />
pages of opinion, in the whirligig<br />
of advertising, at the World Bank and<br />
on Wall Street, in the prospectuses of<br />
globe-spanning corporations and in<br />
the halls of the smallest small-town<br />
chambers of commerce. Growth is<br />
sacrosanct. Growth will bring jobs<br />
and income, which allow us entry into<br />
the state of grace known as affluence,<br />
which permits us to consume more,<br />
providing more jobs for more people<br />
producing more goods and services<br />
so that the all-mighty economy can<br />
continue to grow. “Growth is our idol,<br />
our golden calf,” Herman Daly, an<br />
economist known for his anti-growth<br />
heresies, told me recently.<br />
In the United States, the religion is<br />
expressed most avidly in the cult of the<br />
American Dream. The gatekeepers of<br />
the faith happen to not only be American:<br />
The Dream is now, and has long<br />
been, a pandemic disorder. Growth is<br />
a moral imperative in the developing<br />
world, we are told, because it will free<br />
the global poor from deprivation and<br />
disease. It will enrich and educate the<br />
women of the world, reducing birth<br />
rates. It will provide us the means to<br />
pay for environmental remediation—<br />
to clean up what so-called economic<br />
progress has despoiled. It will lift all<br />
boats, making us all rich, healthy, happy.<br />
East and West, Asia and Europe,<br />
communist and capitalist, big business<br />
and big labor, Nazi and neoliberal, the<br />
governments of just about every modern<br />
nation on Earth: All have espoused<br />
the mad growthist creed.<br />
In 1970, a team of researchers at the<br />
Massachusetts Institute of Technology<br />
began working on what would become<br />
the most important document of the<br />
20 th century to question this orthodoxy.<br />
The scientists spent two years<br />
holed up in the company of a gigantic<br />
mainframe computer, plugging data<br />
into a system dynamics model called<br />
World3, in the first large-scale effort<br />
to grasp the implications of growthism<br />
for mankind. They emerged with a<br />
book called The Limits to Growth,<br />
issued as a slim paperback by a littleknown<br />
publisher in March of 1972. It<br />
exploded onto the scene, becoming the<br />
best-selling environmental title in history.<br />
In the Netherlands half a million<br />
copies sold within the year. More than<br />
three million copies have been sold to<br />
date in at least 30 languages.<br />
Its message was commonsensical:<br />
If humans propagate, spread,<br />
build, consume, and pollute beyond<br />
the limits of our tiny spinning orb,<br />
we will have problems. This was not<br />
what Americans indoctrinated in<br />
growthism had been accustomed to<br />
hearing—and never had they heard it<br />
from Ph.D.’s marshaling data at one of<br />
the world’s citadels of learning.<br />
The idea for the Limits study originated<br />
with a charismatic Italian industrialist<br />
named Aurelio Peccei, who<br />
sidelined as a philosopher and author<br />
on world affairs. Peccei had fought for<br />
the resistance in Italy—he had been<br />
captured and tortured by the fascists—<br />
and had gone on to a spectacular career<br />
working in industry, notably as an executive<br />
at Fiat. By 1968, he had begun<br />
to question the legacy that industrial<br />
civilization was leaving its children.<br />
He published a book on the subject,<br />
The Chasm Ahead, in which he worried<br />
about the “suicidal ignorance of the<br />
human condition” on a planet of dwindling<br />
resources, rampant population<br />
growth and material consumption,<br />
mounting pollution and waste. Seeking<br />
to understand the global system,<br />
its trajectory, and its prospects for<br />
survival, Peccei co-founded the Club<br />
of Rome, a think tank whose purpose<br />
was to lay bare the “predicament of<br />
mankind.” The club would sponsor<br />
the study, and Peccei reached out to<br />
MIT, where a 29-year-old professor of<br />
system dynamics named Dennis Meadows,<br />
who had helped design the World3<br />
computer program, offered to direct it.<br />
Meadows and his team used World3<br />
to examine growth trends worldwide<br />
that had prevailed from 1900 to 1970,<br />
extrapolating from the data to model<br />
12 future scenarios of global development<br />
and its consequences, projected<br />
out to the year 2100. They focused on<br />
the complex feedback loops—the system<br />
dynamics—that play out when we<br />
tax the limits of the planet. The team<br />
separated those limits into two categories:<br />
sources and sinks. Sources are<br />
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48 MAY/JUNE <strong>2017</strong> • PSMAG.COM
those things we need from nature for<br />
industrial civilization to survive: minerals,<br />
metals, rare earth elements, fossil<br />
fuels, fresh water, arable soil. Sinks<br />
refer to the capacity of the planet to<br />
absorb pollution of its soil, air, and water,<br />
and, most ominously, the capacity<br />
of its atmosphere to absorb carbon.<br />
A typical if simplified system dynamic<br />
in the study went like this:<br />
“Population cannot grow without food,<br />
food production is increased by growth<br />
of capital, more capital requires more<br />
resources, discarded resources become<br />
pollution, pollution interferes with the<br />
growth of population and food.” The<br />
models showed that any system based<br />
on exponential economic and population<br />
growth crashed eventually. One<br />
of the gloomier models was called the<br />
standard run, in which the “present<br />
growth trends in world population, industrialization,<br />
pollution, food production,<br />
and resource depletion continue<br />
unchanged.” In that scenario, which<br />
came to be known as business-as-usual,<br />
“the limits to growth on this planet will<br />
be reached sometime within the next<br />
one hundred years,” the team stated.<br />
Things end unhappily: “The most probable<br />
result ... will be a rather sudden<br />
and uncontrollable decline in both<br />
population and industrial capacity.”<br />
Sudden and uncontrollable: in<br />
other words, a collapse of civilization,<br />
a collapse that would mean the loss of<br />
human life, culture, and capital on a<br />
scale unimaginable. The World3 business-as-usual<br />
model did not give an<br />
exact date for the collapse, but suggested<br />
it would likely begin around<br />
the middle of the 21 st century.<br />
immediately<br />
the subject of vicious attack by the<br />
defenders of growthism. The first<br />
salvo arrived in the New York Times in<br />
April of 1972, a month after publication,<br />
from the pens of three economics<br />
professors at Columbia University<br />
and Harvard University, two of whom<br />
happened to be publishing a book that<br />
year about “affluence and its enemies.”<br />
Limits was “an empty and misleading<br />
work,” they wrote. It was “less than<br />
pseudoscience and little more than<br />
polemical fiction.” It had the “scent of<br />
technical chicanery.” The insinuation<br />
was that Meadows’ team had fed bad<br />
data into their supercomputer, the<br />
result being, as the Times reviewers<br />
stated, “garbage in, garbage out.”<br />
The rebukes piled up over the<br />
years: in The Economist, Forbes, Foreign<br />
Affairs, in the halls of academia,<br />
at Yale, Princeton, Harvard, and even<br />
at MIT. With an evangelical fervor,<br />
article after article assured the public<br />
that the book so badly miscalculated<br />
our future it should be dismissed<br />
outright. The most commonly cited<br />
error ascribed to Limits centered on a<br />
table of data that suggested the world<br />
would run out of gold by 1981, petroleum<br />
by 1992, copper, lead, and natural<br />
gas by 1993. Other vital minerals—<br />
silver, tin, zinc, mercury—would be<br />
gone by 2000. But the book’s authors<br />
made no such predictions. The data<br />
was used only to illustrate how exponential<br />
growth quickly depletes nonrenewable<br />
natural resources. Nevertheless,<br />
Limits’ detractors to this day<br />
continue to cite this allegedly erroneous<br />
data set to support the claim that<br />
the modeling was all wrong.<br />
Worse than any specific prediction,<br />
however, was that the Limits<br />
team seemed to be questioning the<br />
viability of the American Dream. “Limits<br />
preaches that we must learn to<br />
make do with what we already have,”<br />
grumbled the economists writing in<br />
the Times. The study was an affront to<br />
the cornucopian credo of mainstream<br />
economics, which says that pricing and<br />
innovation will always save us from the<br />
depletion of sources and the saturation<br />
of sinks. If a resource becomes scarce<br />
in the marketplace, economists tell us,<br />
its price rises, which acts as the signal<br />
for society to innovate alternatives<br />
because there’s money to be made doing<br />
so. If a sink is saturated, technology—priced<br />
right—will ameliorate the<br />
effect, scrub the smokestacks, disperse<br />
the oil spills, and so on.<br />
This unquestioning faith in the<br />
magical powers of human ingenuity<br />
has led economists to make some<br />
preposterous assertions. Oxford<br />
University professor Wilfred Beckerman,<br />
who dubbed Limits “a brazen,<br />
impudent piece of nonsense,” claimed<br />
there is “no reason to suppose that<br />
economic growth cannot continue for<br />
another 2,500 years.” Carl Kaysen, a<br />
doyen of economics at Harvard, said<br />
that, by some calculations, the Earth’s<br />
“available matter and energy” could<br />
support a population of around 3.5<br />
trillion people, all living at American<br />
standards of affluence. Julian Simon,<br />
who publicly expressed his loathing<br />
for Limits, assured us back in 1992<br />
that “We now have in our hands—in<br />
our libraries, really—the technology to<br />
feed, clothe, and supply energy to an<br />
ever-growing population for the next 7<br />
billion years.” Elsewhere, he made the<br />
bizarre declaration that, “in the end,<br />
copper and oil come out of our minds.”<br />
The Limits authors were facing off<br />
against a fundamentalist ideology<br />
here, one that happened to have the<br />
winds of history at its back. In the<br />
two centuries of Western technoindustrial<br />
civilization that preceded<br />
the book, the ceilings to population<br />
and economic growth had been shattered<br />
again and again by free-marketdriven<br />
innovation. The doomsayers<br />
had consistently been proved wrong.<br />
The 18 th -century political economist<br />
Thomas Malthus famously predicted<br />
that exponential growth of population<br />
would eventually outstrip the capacity<br />
of land to produce food, and the result<br />
would be mass starvation. But the<br />
world innovated its way around hunger<br />
with the Green Revolution and<br />
genetically modified organisms and<br />
the deep-drilling of previously untappable<br />
aquifers. So it was that Limits<br />
was relegated to the blinkered realm<br />
of Malthusian doomsdayism.<br />
By the 1980s, President Ronald<br />
Reagan was citing the book in his<br />
speeches only to ridicule it. “Perhaps<br />
you remember a report published a<br />
few years back called The Limits to<br />
Growth,” he said at the University of<br />
South Carolina in 1983. There are “no<br />
such things as limits to growth,” he<br />
declared to the students in the audience.<br />
Even the title itself, Reagan<br />
said, was offensive, because “in this<br />
vast and wonderful world that God<br />
has given us, it’s not what’s inside the<br />
Earth that counts, but what’s inside<br />
your minds and hearts, because that’s<br />
the stuff that dreams are made of, and<br />
America’s future is in your dreams.”<br />
The effect of this critical backlash<br />
was that Limits mostly disappeared<br />
from mainstream discussion. It was<br />
commonly understood, Meadows<br />
said, that it would be very inconvenient<br />
to the high priests of the<br />
growthist orthodoxy if the public began<br />
to take the study seriously. Mead-<br />
MAY/JUNE <strong>2017</strong> • PSMAG.COM 49
ows, who is retired from academia but<br />
still travels the world to lecture, met<br />
readers in the 1970s and ’80s who said<br />
the book had changed their lives. “In<br />
the 1990s and 2000s, they said, ‘Your<br />
book changed my parents’ lives.’<br />
Now,” he said, “I give a speech and<br />
people ask, ‘Did you write a book?’”<br />
last decade,<br />
Limits has attracted renewed interest<br />
from ecologists and economists,<br />
with many having developed their<br />
own methodologies to gauge its accuracy.<br />
In 2014, Graham Turner, of<br />
the Melbourne Sustainable Society<br />
Institute in Australia, compared the<br />
book’s standard run projections with<br />
historical data since 1970. He looked<br />
at, among other statistics, birth and<br />
death rates as an approximation of<br />
population trends, industrial output<br />
per capita as a measure of development,<br />
and carbon in the atmosphere<br />
as a measure of pollution. We are<br />
hewing pretty closely to business-asusual,<br />
he concluded, noting that “the<br />
alignment of data trends with the<br />
LTG dynamics indicates that the early<br />
stages of collapse could occur within<br />
a decade, or might even be underway.”<br />
In March of 2016, the All-Party Parliamentary<br />
Group on Limits to Growth<br />
in the United Kingdom issued a report<br />
declaring that the 1972 projections<br />
were worrisomely spot-on. The author<br />
of the report, Tim Jackson, a professor<br />
of sustainable development at the University<br />
of Surrey, told me, “Numerous<br />
analyses have shown that the historical<br />
data track very closely the lines of<br />
the Limits to Growth standard run.”<br />
Ecologists Charles Hall and John W.<br />
Day conducted their own comparison<br />
of Limits’ projections with real-world<br />
data in 2009, and found the projections<br />
to be “quite on target. We are not aware<br />
of any model made by economists that<br />
is as accurate over such a long time<br />
span.” Matthew Simmons, the noted<br />
investment banker whose company<br />
managed tens of billions of dollars in<br />
energy-industry mergers and acquisitions,<br />
offered a similar observation in<br />
2000. “The most amazing aspect of the<br />
book,” he wrote, “is how accurate many<br />
of the basic trend extrapolation[s] ...<br />
still are 30 years later.”<br />
On the book’s 20 th anniversary,<br />
in 1992, Meadows gathered up his<br />
original team to co-author an update<br />
called Beyond the Limits, and, in 2004,<br />
he completed a 30-year update. He<br />
hoped, in part, to address the most<br />
widespread critique of the 1972 study:<br />
that it had underestimated innovation<br />
and technology, the twin engines of<br />
industrial civilization and the pillars<br />
of the growthist faith. The first edition<br />
of Limits had, in fact, gone a long way<br />
toward accommodating technology as<br />
a possible saving grace for the growth<br />
system. In one of the 12 scenarios, the<br />
authors modeled a world system “producing<br />
nuclear power, recycling resources,<br />
and mining the most remote<br />
reserves; withholding as many pollutants<br />
as possible; pushing yields from<br />
the land to undreamed-of heights; and<br />
producing only children who are actively<br />
wanted by their parents.” Nevertheless,<br />
the authors wrote, “the result<br />
is still an end to growth before the year<br />
2100. The application of technological<br />
solutions alone has prolonged the<br />
period of population and industrial<br />
growth, but it has not removed the<br />
ultimate limits to that growth.”<br />
The version of World3 that Meadows<br />
used for the second and third<br />
editions of the book incorporated the<br />
possibility of far greater technological<br />
advances. “But the results and our<br />
conclusions remained the same,” he<br />
told me. “In those later runs we even<br />
assumed infinite resources. But guess<br />
what? It is still impossible for the human<br />
population and consumption to<br />
grow exponentially forever.”<br />
Now, at the very moment that we<br />
need innovation to accelerate—to<br />
mount a viable response to climate<br />
change, to locate new resources and<br />
replace dwindling or despoiled ones—<br />
evidence suggests that the opposite is<br />
happening. Joseph Tainter, a professor<br />
of sustainability at Utah State University,<br />
examined innovation trends using<br />
30 years of data from the U.S. Patent<br />
and Trademark Office. What he found<br />
was troubling. Slightly more than half<br />
of all patents issued in this country are<br />
to foreign entities, so Tainter considered<br />
changes to the number of patents<br />
per applicant to be an accurate indicator<br />
of global productivity as expressed<br />
through invention. In the major<br />
technical fields he studied—drugs and<br />
chemicals, metallurgy, energy, biotechnology,<br />
information technology,<br />
and so on—he found that the number<br />
of researchers on each patent steadily<br />
increased between 1974 and 2005. This<br />
means more time and man-hours—and<br />
presumably more money invested—for<br />
a declining return. In his 1988 book The<br />
Collapse of Complex Societies—a kind of<br />
companion volume to Limits—Tainter<br />
makes the case that as civilizations<br />
grow they produce increasingly complex<br />
problems that demand increasingly<br />
complex solutions. Complexity<br />
demands more energy, requiring new<br />
technologies for energy extraction. But,<br />
as Tainter’s study suggests, innovation<br />
may have its own limits.<br />
The concept of energy-return-oninvestment,<br />
known as EROI, was originally<br />
coined in reference to fossil-fuel<br />
exploration, and is commonly used<br />
to compare the amount of energy required<br />
to extract, transport, and refine<br />
a particular resource with the amount<br />
of energy it ultimately provides. EROI<br />
for our master energy source happens<br />
to be plummeting, as discovery<br />
and extraction of fossil fuels becomes<br />
more difficult and costly. (The rising<br />
cost—which is to say complexity—of<br />
resource extraction and retrieval was<br />
one of Limits’ broad projections that<br />
also turned out to be accurate.) EROI<br />
for global oil and gas production went<br />
from 30-to-1 in 1995 to 18-to-1 in 2006.<br />
In the U.S., the EROI for oil discovery<br />
in 1919 was an astonishing 1,000-to-1.<br />
By the 2010s, it was 5-to-1.<br />
In mining, multifactor productivity—which<br />
reflects the efficiency with<br />
which the inputs of capital, labor, materials,<br />
services, and energy generate a<br />
unit of mineral product—has been on<br />
a downward slope since 2002. According<br />
to the Australian Bureau of Statistics,<br />
it now takes 40 percent more<br />
inputs to dig up minerals in general,<br />
while the grain sizes and ore grades of<br />
what’s being retrieved are declining.<br />
The Journal of Environmental Science<br />
and Engineering reported in 2013 that,<br />
“under the present paradigm of use,”<br />
the world, within decades, will begin<br />
seeing “scarcity” of “most of the strategically<br />
important metals and materials<br />
that are fundamental to [the]<br />
running of our societies.” According<br />
to the study’s lead authors, a chemical<br />
engineering professor at Lund University<br />
in Sweden and an applied systems<br />
analyst at Stockholm University,<br />
“scarcity may lead [to] ‘peak civiliza-<br />
50 MAY/JUNE <strong>2017</strong> • PSMAG.COM
TOP: BOMBILLAS, 2013; BOTTOM: ALGAS, 2013
tion,’ unless urgent countermeasures<br />
are systematically undertaken.”<br />
Even in the midst of substantial<br />
innovation, today’s global economy<br />
has become more profligate and more<br />
wasteful, using more materials per<br />
unit of GDP than it did 20 years ago.<br />
According to a 2016 report from the<br />
International Resource Panel at the<br />
United Nations Environment Programme,<br />
the amount of virgin natural<br />
resource needed for a given amount of<br />
product has gone up 17 percent over<br />
a single decade. In 2000, it took an<br />
average 1.2 kilograms of materials to<br />
generate one dollar of global GDP. By<br />
2010, it took 1.4 kilograms. The amount<br />
of primary materials extracted from<br />
the Earth globally rose from 22 billion<br />
tonnes in 1970 to 70 billion tonnes in<br />
2010, with per capita global material<br />
use going from seven tonnes in 1970 to<br />
10 tonnes over the same 40-year period.<br />
According to the report, there is<br />
“growing environmental pressure per<br />
unit of economic activity,” not less.<br />
Optimists will undoubtedly look to<br />
renewable energy as a stay against declining<br />
EROI and rising seas. But they<br />
may be blindsided by the stark limits of<br />
wind, solar, and hydro. Researchers at<br />
Monash University, marshaling considerable<br />
data, concluded that the cheerful<br />
scenarios projecting renewables will<br />
supply most of the world’s energy by<br />
mid-century “assume unrealistic technical<br />
potentials and implementation<br />
times.” Which means we’ll be stuck<br />
mostly with fossil fuels to keep the expansion<br />
machine running. Tim Jackson<br />
of the University of Surrey has calculated<br />
that, at current rates of carbon<br />
density—the amount of carbon released<br />
per unit of energy consumed—our<br />
greenhouse gas emissions will increase<br />
by more than 2 percent per year. At<br />
that rate, by 2050 carbon dioxide emissions<br />
would be more than double what<br />
they were in 2015. To achieve a tenfold<br />
reduction in global emissions by 2050,<br />
carbon density would have to decline<br />
on average 8.6 percent annually—almost<br />
10 times the rate at which it has<br />
declined over the last 50 years and 50<br />
times faster than in the past decade. In<br />
other words, we would have to innovate<br />
carbon-reduction strategies at rates<br />
never before seen, with technologies of<br />
immense effectiveness whose globalscale<br />
implementation would be entirely<br />
unprecedented.<br />
as we blunder along<br />
with business-as-usual, awaiting the<br />
techno-messiah promised by the cornucopians<br />
with their free markets and<br />
their profit-inspired geniuses, an alternate<br />
future awaits us. In 2014, Naomi<br />
Oreskes and Erik Conway, historians of<br />
science at Harvard and the California<br />
Institute of Technology, respectively,<br />
gave us a picture of what that future<br />
might look like. Together they published<br />
The Collapse of Western Civilization,<br />
a grim work of futurist science<br />
fiction. It was Limits transformed into<br />
a novella of climate-fueled apocalypse.<br />
“Suffice it to say that total losses—<br />
social, cultural, economic, and demographic—were<br />
greater than any in<br />
recorded human history,” declares the<br />
narrator, a historian who lives in a hobbled,<br />
depopulated society 300 years<br />
after the “ultimate blow for Western<br />
civilization.” That blow comes in 2093,<br />
when breakneck atmospheric warming<br />
leads to the disintegration of the West<br />
Antarctica Ice Sheet. This results in<br />
a sea level rise of five meters or more<br />
that inundates coastal cities and, combined<br />
with the effects of other melting<br />
ice sheets, sends billions of people fleeing<br />
inland to higher ground.<br />
The ice sheet meltdown is preceded<br />
by decades of social and economic unrest<br />
driven by climate change. In the<br />
year 2041, for example, a series of “unprecedented<br />
heat waves” scorches the<br />
global food supply. In North America,<br />
desertification that had started in<br />
the early 21 st century consumes the<br />
world’s most productive farmland in<br />
California and the Great Plains. As<br />
the unrest intensifies the U.S. declares<br />
martial law, so the good citizens won’t<br />
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52 MAY/JUNE <strong>2017</strong> • PSMAG.COM
iot, fighting each other for crumbs.<br />
Governments worldwide are destabilized,<br />
overthrown. The warmer<br />
planet, a Petri dish for insects whose<br />
ranges have expanded, releases upon<br />
a starved, dehydrated, weakened humanity<br />
the usual diseases borne by<br />
flies and mosquitoes—dengue fever,<br />
yellow fever—and lack of sanitation in<br />
mass encampments leads to explosive<br />
outbreaks of those old nemeses, typhus<br />
and cholera, while there emerge, as<br />
the future chronicler writes, “viral and<br />
retroviral agents never before seen.”<br />
What stuns the future chronicler in<br />
The Collapse of Western Civilization,<br />
looking back on this tragic period,<br />
is that the smartest scientists in the<br />
world, employing the most advanced<br />
analytical and technical methods<br />
available, had charted the trajectory<br />
toward climate doom long before it<br />
was a fait accompli. They had warned<br />
that, if civilization was to survive, it<br />
had to reduce its pressure on waste<br />
sinks. “Virtually all agree that the<br />
people of Western civilization knew<br />
what was happening to them but were<br />
unable to stop it,” says the narrator.<br />
“Indeed, the most startling aspect of<br />
this story is just how much these people<br />
knew, and how unable they were<br />
to act upon what they knew.”<br />
somber<br />
context, Limits was not all gloom. Of<br />
the 12 scenarios it presented, four did<br />
not end in collapse. Economic and<br />
ecological stability was possible, the<br />
researchers found, but only if global<br />
society engaged in “a deliberate,<br />
controlled end to growth,” reducing<br />
industrial output and per-capita<br />
consumption. Limits described this as<br />
a “stabilized” world scenario, “a longterm<br />
equilibrium state” in which “the<br />
basic material needs of each person<br />
on Earth are satisfied and each person<br />
has an equal opportunity to realize<br />
his individual human potential.”<br />
Enough stuff to go around, enough<br />
for everyone to share in a decent life,<br />
so long as we all agree not to want too<br />
much. Terrifying notions for those of<br />
us—by which I mean most of us—who<br />
are entrenched in the free-market capitalist<br />
mindset. No wonder it was the<br />
mainstream economists who mounted<br />
the strongest attacks on Limits, those<br />
whose paychecks depend on elite capitalist<br />
institutions, who construct for<br />
the public the ideology that rationalizes<br />
endless growth, who assure that we will<br />
never need to share our piece of the pie<br />
if we just keep on growing the pie.<br />
The driving question behind the<br />
study was whether global society<br />
could organize itself to live within<br />
its means while providing a peaceful,<br />
equitable existence for its people. By<br />
asking that question and answering it,<br />
Limits was dangerous to a social order<br />
that posits selfishness, greed, and<br />
envy as the drivers of progress, that<br />
tells us to hoard for ourselves what we<br />
can get and ignore the pangs of conscience<br />
reminding us that the bigger<br />
pie hasn’t led to a better life for all.<br />
When the authors of Limits said<br />
in 1972 that “population and capital<br />
growth are actually increasing the gap<br />
between the rich and the poor,” when<br />
they debunked the myth that more<br />
growth will lead to human equality,<br />
they were waving a knife at the neoliberal<br />
capitalist order. Because what else<br />
were they talking about in a world with<br />
no growth and equal opportunity than<br />
the redistribution of wealth? What<br />
else were they demanding but a radical<br />
change in our definition of liberty?<br />
“Equilibrium,” they wrote, “would require<br />
trading certain human freedoms,<br />
such as producing unlimited numbers<br />
of children or consuming uncontrolled<br />
amounts of resources, for other freedoms,<br />
such as relief from pollution and<br />
crowding and the threat of collapse of<br />
the world system.” They suggested it<br />
was a trade-off worth making. But the<br />
downsizing, the sharing, would have to<br />
be voluntary. We couldn’t do it under<br />
conditions of coercion. It would have to<br />
be, in Dennis Meadows’ words, an “orderly<br />
and cooperative descent toward a<br />
socially just sustainability for all.”<br />
The bottom line, though, is that if<br />
wealth were divided evenly among<br />
the nine billion people expected on<br />
this planet by 2050, the per capita<br />
material affluence of the global north<br />
would have to drop significantly. It’s<br />
doubtful that an entire civilization<br />
indoctrinated in selfishness would<br />
bear this without an epic tantrum. It<br />
would be a process of social maturation<br />
on a scale never before seen. Because<br />
in order to retain our humanity<br />
in the face of limits, we would have to<br />
confront inequality head on.<br />
up Meadows to ask<br />
him what he thought about Limits<br />
to Growth 44 years after its publication.<br />
He said that he was optimistic in<br />
1972. There was time enough to divert<br />
the ship of too-muchness from its<br />
collision course with the iceberg. But<br />
last summer he sounded depressed<br />
and somewhat cynical. Business-asusual,<br />
he said, risks a chaotic implosion<br />
imposed by nature, followed by<br />
geopolitical turmoil and resource<br />
wars. This now seemed to be our<br />
likely path, and it was time, he said, to<br />
prepare for “system shock.”<br />
Meadows sees a link between limits<br />
to growth and what he calls “the authoritarian<br />
tsunami that is sweeping<br />
across Western democracies.” He believes<br />
that global society has already<br />
entered the phase where the capacity<br />
to grow, to generate real new wealth,<br />
is declining. When growth stops,<br />
tensions mount. “Adapting our institutions,<br />
population, aspirations, culture,<br />
norms, and capital to this new<br />
phase of zero and negative growth,”<br />
Meadows told me, “will entail many<br />
decades of change that most people<br />
will experience as a deterioration of<br />
order”—and thus as a mandate for<br />
more-authoritarian government.<br />
Aldous Huxley predicted this<br />
eventuality. “There are many roads<br />
to Brave New World,” he wrote in<br />
1958. “[B]ut perhaps the straightest<br />
and the broadest of them is the road<br />
we are traveling today, the road that<br />
leads through gigantic numbers and<br />
accelerating increases.” A planet with<br />
a population and economy so large it<br />
produces a permanent civilizational<br />
emergency, a state of constant crisis,<br />
is one ripe for “permanent control<br />
of everybody and everything by the<br />
agencies of the central government.”<br />
This would be the ultimate irony of<br />
the growthist faith, underpinned as<br />
it is by free-market fundamentalism:<br />
Only the tyrannical state, with its monopoly<br />
on violence, its enormous bureaucracies,<br />
its tentacles reaching into<br />
every facet of life, will have the power<br />
to save us from the stupidity that we<br />
called the freedom to grow forever.<br />
•CHRISTOPHER KETCHAM is a freelance<br />
writer. He is writing a book about<br />
the public lands of the American West.<br />
MAY/JUNE <strong>2017</strong> • PSMAG.COM 53
AN UPSTAIRS office at New York’s Morgan<br />
Library, John McQuillen, assistant<br />
curator of printed books, pulled a large,<br />
thick tome off a standard gray library<br />
cart and laid it in a foam book cradle<br />
the way a mother might lay a baby on<br />
a bed. The volume was bound in giltembossed<br />
leather and had metal clasps<br />
on the fore-edge. On the foot-edge, the<br />
vellum pages were irregularly wavy,<br />
betraying their sheepskin roots.<br />
McQuillen spends his days handling<br />
extremely rare and valuable books. But<br />
even he had a reverent air as he opened<br />
the volume, revealing two blocks of<br />
right-justified Latin in jet-black Textura<br />
font, surrounded by a tracery<br />
of elaborate and colorful scrollwork<br />
inked in by hand. Across from McQuillen,<br />
artist Jenifer Wightman bounced<br />
up and down on her toes with glee. This<br />
book—the Gutenberg Bible, the first<br />
notable book that was mass-produced<br />
using moveable type—was the reason<br />
Wightman had come to the Morgan.<br />
She had a few amendments for it.<br />
There are 48 reasonably intact<br />
Gutenberg Bibles known in the world,<br />
20 of which are complete copies that<br />
include both volumes, the Old and<br />
New Testaments. The original print<br />
run—scholars think it was around<br />
180 copies—is usually dated to 1455.<br />
Today they are some of the most valuable<br />
books in the world. In 2015, eight<br />
pages of a Gutenberg sold at Sotheby’s<br />
for nearly a million dollars. Even incomplete<br />
Gutenbergs are kept under<br />
lock and key, and, in most cases, you<br />
need a very good reason to be allowed<br />
to look at one.<br />
The Morgan Library owns three<br />
Gutenberg Bibles, more than any other<br />
institution on Earth, and McQuillen<br />
had brought two of them out for<br />
Wightman. It was a thrilling moment.<br />
Wightman slid a single sheet of handmade<br />
cotton-and-flax paper from a<br />
large envelope. It contained four drawings<br />
and a single block of type 42 lines<br />
long—the same format as the Gutenberg—comprising<br />
an addendum to the<br />
book of Genesis that reinterprets the<br />
story of Adam and Eve using evolutionary<br />
and contemporary science. Mc-<br />
Quillen held up the broadside next to<br />
the open Bible on the desk. Wightman<br />
took several photographs. She was one<br />
step closer to achieving her mission:<br />
adding her addendum to every known<br />
Gutenberg Bible in the world.<br />
Wightman has been offering to<br />
donate the broadside and hand deliver<br />
it to every institution that owns<br />
a Gutenberg. The review process<br />
that ensues can be lengthy and trying.<br />
Many libraries have accepted<br />
the addendum, but did not bring out<br />
their Bible for her to see. At least one<br />
wouldn’t even let her inside the building.<br />
But with the Morgan acquisition<br />
of three broadsides, she had delivered<br />
addenda to 39 of the 48 extant Gutenberg<br />
Bibles. That’s right: For the last<br />
two years, while #teachevolution<br />
ricocheted harmlessly through the<br />
digital echo-chamber, Wightman has<br />
been using the master’s font to footnote<br />
the master text, convincing the<br />
most august libraries on the planet,<br />
including the Vatican’s own Apostolic<br />
Library, to add a page of Darwinian<br />
science to Christianity’s origin of the<br />
species. Were it packaged as an app or<br />
a Twitter feed, you might call her project<br />
disruptive. But because it’s print—<br />
hand-printed letterpress no less—it is<br />
somehow even more subversive.<br />
ohannes Gutenberg<br />
designed and<br />
printed a number of<br />
books, but his masterpiece<br />
is known<br />
to book geeks as the<br />
B42, for its 42 lines of text per page.<br />
B42s are celebrated for their rarity—exactly<br />
the opposite of what made<br />
them world-shattering. The Gutenberg<br />
Bible wasn’t the first printed book<br />
(though it is often mistaken as such).<br />
Nor was Gutenberg the inventor of the<br />
printed page. By the 1400s, print had<br />
been around for hundreds of years in<br />
China, Korea, and Japan. And moveable<br />
type had been experimented with<br />
by others, but Gutenberg perfected<br />
it, making the mass reproduction of<br />
books possible. It’s generally accepted<br />
that this launched a revolution. Print<br />
disrupted the entrenched hierarchies<br />
of the world. Priests were no longer<br />
the keepers of the Word. Monarchs<br />
could be held accountable when laws<br />
could be cheaply reproduced. Governments<br />
were more easily changed<br />
in a world where news disseminated<br />
quickly. Scholars and scientists could<br />
build on previous knowledge, giving<br />
rise to modern history, mathematics,<br />
philosophy, and the physical sciences.<br />
Print not only helped knowledge<br />
grow, but made it more democratic.<br />
Literacy became more widespread and<br />
learning more accessible. Cases have<br />
been made for crediting print, at least<br />
in part, with the Protestant Reformation,<br />
the emergence of capitalism, the<br />
rise of universal suffrage, and the scientific<br />
revolution. Once print culture<br />
took hold, knowledge spread more<br />
easily through a process of dissemination,<br />
incorporation, iteration. Charles<br />
Darwin very logically proposed that<br />
life forms evolve in the same way.<br />
eni Wightman is a<br />
wiry woman with a<br />
cricket-like intensity<br />
and an almost<br />
runic conversational<br />
style. In addition<br />
to being an artist, she works as a research<br />
specialist in greenhouse-gas<br />
accounting at Cornell University. She<br />
came up with the images for her addendum<br />
by surveying the entire faculty<br />
of Cornell about which graphic<br />
representation of a scientific concept<br />
they had found most life-changing.<br />
She chose four of those drawings to<br />
represent the main symbols in Genesis.<br />
The Tree of Life is explained as the<br />
phylogenetic branching diagram that<br />
shows the evolutionary connectedness<br />
of all biological species. The creation<br />
of Eve from Adam’s rib she declares a<br />
metaphor for mitosis, or cell division.<br />
56 MAY/JUNE <strong>2017</strong> • PSMAG.COM
The apple stands for ion channels, the<br />
proteins in our cell walls that charge<br />
neurons to carry signals, helping to<br />
build the biological infrastructure for<br />
knowledge. The snake is DNA.<br />
“I took poetic license with the<br />
snake,” Wightman confessed.<br />
She devised the broadside, officially<br />
titled Genesis Addendum: Original<br />
Syn Thesis, during a residency at the<br />
Center for Book Arts in New York.<br />
Drafting the addendum was only the<br />
first part of the project. Printing it<br />
in a letterpress format that matched<br />
that of the B42 was the second part. It<br />
was a long and painstaking effort. But<br />
the real heart of the project is getting<br />
those addenda into libraries—catalogued<br />
and archived in association<br />
with the book that started it all.<br />
“I’m not addending all Bibles; I’m addending<br />
Gutenberg Bibles,” Wightman<br />
explained at the New York Public Library’s<br />
main branch, five blocks north<br />
of the Morgan. In other words, her project<br />
is not only about adding evolution<br />
to the creation story; it’s about showing<br />
how the scientific revolution itself was<br />
dependent on the revolution of print.<br />
She was at the NYPL to deliver an<br />
addendum to the first Gutenberg to<br />
be brought to the United States. The<br />
copy had been purchased in 1847<br />
by businessman and philanthropist<br />
James Lenox, one of the library’s<br />
founders. Library lore holds that the<br />
workers in the customs house were<br />
made to remove their hats to show respect<br />
for the book upon seeing it. Yet<br />
Lenox’s book buyer, Henry Stevens, in<br />
his gossipy 1886 memoir, relates that<br />
Lenox was initially so appalled at the<br />
$3,000 his agent had doled out for the<br />
Bible that he refused to clear the book<br />
through customs. It was only after “a<br />
good deal of correspondence” that<br />
Lenox “took home the book, and soon<br />
learned to cherish it as a bargain and<br />
the chief ornament of his library.”<br />
When Wightman visited, Lenox’s<br />
chief ornament was lounging in an<br />
acrylic cube in the NYPL’s McGraw<br />
Rotunda. (Normally it lives in the<br />
Main Reading Room, but that room<br />
was undergoing restoration.) She had<br />
to wait for a group of Chinese tourists<br />
to finish taking selfies with the Bible<br />
before snapping a photo of her own.<br />
The McGraw Rotunda features a set<br />
of four murals collectively called The<br />
Story of the Recorded Word: Moses<br />
delivering the Ten Commandments; a<br />
medieval scribe copying a manuscript;<br />
Gutenberg before his press displaying<br />
a proof page of his Bible; and a newspaper<br />
editor reading pages fresh off a<br />
Linotype machine. It feels as if there’s<br />
something missing in this progression.<br />
Larry Page and Sergey Brin writing<br />
code in a garage? Ben Kovitz explaining<br />
the concept of a wiki to Jimmy<br />
Wales? The upload of Grumpy Cat’s<br />
first video? The next frame in this sequence<br />
is surely digital. But in an era of<br />
fake news, “fake” real news, and truthiness,<br />
it seems crucial to ask: Does each<br />
communication revolution necessarily<br />
supplant the one that came before?<br />
utenberg’s name is<br />
nearly always paired<br />
with the Bible—and<br />
this shapes our feelings<br />
about his print<br />
revolution, making<br />
it seem stolid, even orthodox. But the<br />
Bible was not the first thing Gutenberg<br />
printed. His first book was a Latin<br />
grammar for schoolboys, Ars Minor by<br />
Aelius Donatus. Around the time of the<br />
B42, Gutenberg was also printing certificates<br />
used to sell plenary indulgences,<br />
a calendar filled with inflammatory,<br />
anti-Muslim doggerel inciting war with<br />
the Turks, and a New Age-y mystical<br />
poem from the Sibylline Prophecies. In<br />
fact, it took a while for the print revolution<br />
to move into the sphere of reason;<br />
for the first few decades, what churned<br />
off the presses was mostly astrology,<br />
alchemy, and good old soft porn. The<br />
age of Gutenberg, it seems, was a lot<br />
like the age of YouTube.<br />
Today, however, the pop culture that<br />
print spawned views print as a relic, an<br />
outmoded technology that shaped an<br />
outdated world. Even the name Gutenberg<br />
is used to evoke his own obsolescence,<br />
as in Sven Birkerts’ gloomy The<br />
Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading<br />
in an Electronic Age. Marshall McLuhan<br />
launched this trend pre-Internet<br />
with 1962’s The Gutenberg Galaxy:<br />
The Making of Typographic Man. The<br />
book argued that moveable type had<br />
remade culture for the worse, increasing<br />
human alienation by privileging<br />
the visual, the rational, and the standardized<br />
over the more freewheeling,<br />
one-to-one oral culture that preceded<br />
it. McLuhan and followers, like his<br />
student Walter Ong, claimed that print<br />
was quickly succumbing to “secondary<br />
orality”—by which they meant radio<br />
and television—making culture once<br />
again more immediate, participatory,<br />
and ecstatic.<br />
That sort of happened, and sort of<br />
didn’t. The electronic age killed off<br />
some things, like popular magazine<br />
fiction. People stopped discussing<br />
novels around the water cooler and<br />
started discussing shows on NBC or<br />
HBO around the microwave. Today<br />
that discussion has evolved into<br />
tweeting about shows on Amazon.<br />
But radio and TV did not terminate<br />
print, or the book. Nevertheless, the<br />
same argument is now made about<br />
the Internet. Print’s demise at the<br />
hands of tech has been bemoaned<br />
frequently enough to garner an Onion<br />
headline: “Print Dead at 1,803.”<br />
People in the tech world reheated<br />
and reserved the argument a few years<br />
back with the concept of the Gutenberg<br />
Parenthesis. Proponents claimed<br />
that books “imprisoned” words, and<br />
that print culture created the expectation<br />
of stable, original, authoritative<br />
texts. Print thus gave rise to rigid,<br />
category-based thinking: You could<br />
blame it for racism, sexism, and class<br />
immobility. The oral culture that preceded<br />
the parenthesis, and the digital<br />
culture now succeeding it, free texts—<br />
and humans—from the prison-house<br />
of printed language, they say.<br />
Of course, this supposedly parenthetical<br />
era of entrapment saw the<br />
French and American revolutions,<br />
the freeing of Russia’s serfs, the end<br />
of the slave trade, and the dawn of<br />
civil rights and women’s rights and<br />
LGBTQ rights. That’s a lot of freedom<br />
and justice being aided and abetted by<br />
the allegedly repressive technology of<br />
print. But the bigger problem with the<br />
parenthesis concept is the idea that<br />
texts remain rigid, while oral and digital<br />
expressions are malleable and free.<br />
Print standardized texts, but it<br />
didn’t make them less interactive. It<br />
made them more so. Once books were<br />
mass-produced, it became a more<br />
trivial thing to illustrate, bind, or<br />
rebind them. The title letters of the<br />
B42 itself were left blank so people<br />
could have them rubricated—colored<br />
in—themselves. Books were easily<br />
written on, torn up, even burned. The<br />
Gutenberg revolution, no less than<br />
MAY/JUNE <strong>2017</strong> • PSMAG.COM 57
the digital one, encouraged a culture<br />
of revision—and also one of sampling,<br />
sharing, reworking, and theft.<br />
It’s tempting to look wistfully<br />
backwards at print as a guarantor of<br />
authority, or at least of truth. In the<br />
days of hometown newspapers, we<br />
all agreed on at least a few tenets of<br />
objective reality. But when a Balkanbrewed<br />
conspiracy theory or a baseless<br />
claim via tweet can circulate the<br />
planet and flash in front of millions of<br />
eyeballs before being refuted, when<br />
there are facts and “alternative facts,”<br />
reality itself is under siege.<br />
This situation is worthy of consideration—but<br />
it has nothing to do with<br />
print versus digital. To see printed<br />
texts as rigid prison-houses while seeing<br />
digital and oral communication as<br />
orgies of multivalence is to mistake<br />
the forest fire for the trees. In fact, the<br />
more authoritative a book is, the more<br />
subject it is to endless re-reading and<br />
re-interpretation. Case in point: the<br />
Bible. All the printing press really did<br />
was unleash the disruptive potential of<br />
the word. Any technology that enabled<br />
quick and easy reproductions of text<br />
would have led to the dissemination<br />
and popularization of radical ideas like<br />
democracy, equality, and individual<br />
freedom. Had Gutenberg invented<br />
the World Wide Web instead of moveable<br />
type, or trained pigeons to tap<br />
out books with their beaks, the results<br />
would have been much the same: Martin<br />
Luther, Galileo, Charles Darwin,<br />
Karl Marx, Steve Jobs. By now, Ray<br />
Kurzweil would be assuring us the pigeons<br />
were becoming self-aware.<br />
hat print doomsayers<br />
tend to miss<br />
is the very thing<br />
Wightman’s project<br />
cleverly demonstrates:<br />
The revolution<br />
is not simply about the medium,<br />
or the message. It’s also about the<br />
matrix. Gutenberg Bibles exist inside<br />
a larger apparatus that was also<br />
transformed by print: the apparatus<br />
of the library. The library is not simply<br />
storage for books, but a storehouse for<br />
knowledge. A searchable storehouse—<br />
a kind of analog Internet. Its custodians<br />
are curators, archivists, and librarians,<br />
some of whom were suspicious of<br />
Wightman’s project, especially in the<br />
beginning. (Libraries don’t just accept<br />
and catalog any old thing.) For her first<br />
donation, in 2014, at the Bayerische<br />
Staatsbibliothek in Munich, Wightman<br />
was handed off to three different<br />
curators before she convinced one to<br />
accept the addendum.<br />
“I think they all thought I was a nut<br />
job,” she said. She finds the process of<br />
cold-calling somewhat stressful. “It<br />
wasn’t until the eighth or 10th delivery<br />
that it started to be fun.”<br />
That’s because libraries, unlike the<br />
Internet, have gatekeepers. Still, almost<br />
every library she has approached<br />
has accepted the donation. The library’s<br />
mission, after all, is to accumulate<br />
information; its own logic makes<br />
addenda its goal. Even the Vatican,<br />
where Wightman feared her scientific<br />
re-interpretation of biblical texts<br />
might be unwelcome, bowed to the<br />
prerogative of collection. Ambrogio<br />
Piazzoni, vice prefect of the Biblioteca<br />
Apostolica Vaticana, listened with interest<br />
as Wightman explained her text.<br />
“He said, ‘So it’s just another creation<br />
story?’ and I said ‘Yes!’” she<br />
recalled. The Vatican has two Gutenbergs,<br />
so she donated two addenda.<br />
Only one library thus far has refused<br />
the gift outright: the Bibliothèque<br />
Nationale de France, which<br />
owns two Gutenbergs. Requests for<br />
comment from the bibliothèque<br />
have thus far received no reply. After<br />
Wightman’s New York excursions,<br />
she had delivered 39 addenda. Thirtyfour<br />
had been formally accepted, two<br />
rejected, and three were still pending<br />
review. Libraries that have accepted<br />
and catalogued Genesis Addendum<br />
include the Gutenberg Museum in<br />
Mainz, Germany; the Staatsbibliothek<br />
zu Berlin; the Royal Library in Denmark;<br />
the National Library of Scotland;<br />
the Bodmer Library in Switzerland;<br />
and the Russian State Library,<br />
whose copy of the B42 was taken as<br />
war booty from Germany at the end of<br />
World War II. Wightman was allowed<br />
to see that Bible, but not to touch it.<br />
The amount of access that librarians<br />
accepting her donation have<br />
been willing to give her has varied.<br />
At Cambridge University Library,<br />
she was allowed to photograph the<br />
Gutenberg Bible with her Addendum<br />
literally addending it. At Lomonosov<br />
Moscow State University she never<br />
got past the foyer. Some archivists<br />
THE EVOLUTION OF<br />
STORYTELLING<br />
TECHNOLOGY<br />
BY MORGAN BASKIN<br />
& JACK DENTON<br />
CAVE ART<br />
~35,000 years ago<br />
The French anthropologist<br />
Claude Lévi-Strauss argued<br />
that early human art depicted<br />
animals “not because they are<br />
‘good to eat’ but because they<br />
are ‘good to think.’”<br />
CUNEIFORM<br />
~5,000 to 6,000 years ago<br />
One of the earliest forms<br />
of written communication,<br />
cuneiform’s wedge-shaped and<br />
linear characters developed<br />
over centuries in ancient<br />
Mesopotamia, eventually<br />
becoming sophisticated<br />
enough to convey fictional and<br />
non-fictional narratives. Over<br />
300,000 inscribed clay tablets<br />
survive to this day.<br />
LIBRARY<br />
~3,000 to 5,000 years ago<br />
By about 3000 B.C.E., carefully<br />
organized libraries had been<br />
built to hold hundreds of<br />
thousands of tablets inscribed<br />
with government, business, and<br />
temple records. Hammurabi’s<br />
Code of Laws, inscribed in tiny<br />
cuneiform script on a sevenfoot<br />
basalt stele, details one of<br />
the most elaborate early law<br />
systems, including around 30<br />
different crimes that garnered<br />
the death penalty.<br />
ALPHABET<br />
~2,800 to 3,200 years ago<br />
Though the Phoenicians<br />
of present-day Egypt are<br />
thought to have introduced the<br />
alphabet concept to the Greeks<br />
sometime around the eighth<br />
century B.C.E., the Greek<br />
alphabet was more advanced,<br />
and was written with a more<br />
cursive flourish. Scholars<br />
credit the innovation—using<br />
a consistent set of shapes<br />
that can be combined and<br />
rearranged into different<br />
words—with democratizing<br />
knowledge, a revolution on par<br />
with the printing press.<br />
PRINTING PRESS<br />
1440s<br />
In the half-century following<br />
Johannes Gutenberg’s<br />
invention, 10 million books<br />
58 MAY/JUNE <strong>2017</strong> • PSMAG.COM
were printed, and the price<br />
of a book fell by two-thirds.<br />
Industrial-scale printing united<br />
once-disparate academic<br />
disciplines, turning the print<br />
shop into a cultural center.<br />
Centuries later, myths swirled<br />
that Johann Fust, financier<br />
for Gutenberg’s original press,<br />
had been working for the<br />
devil, probably a consequence<br />
of the similarities between<br />
his surname and that of the<br />
blasphemous and morally<br />
bankrupt Dr. Faust from<br />
German lore.<br />
TYPEWRITER<br />
1714<br />
Although a commercially<br />
successful typewriter wasn’t<br />
created until the early 1870s,<br />
in 1714 an Englishman named<br />
Henry Mill received a patent<br />
for a machine capable of the<br />
“impressing or transcribing of<br />
letters, one after another, as in<br />
writing.” Several early “writing<br />
machine” prototypes were<br />
created to help the blind write.<br />
MOVING PICTURES<br />
1878<br />
In 1878, the British photographer<br />
Eadweard Muybridge captured<br />
a series of photographs of a<br />
galloping racehorse to prove<br />
that all of a horse’s hooves<br />
are simultaneously aloft midgallop.<br />
He then projected the<br />
images onto a screen in quick<br />
succession with a device he<br />
called a zoopraxiscope, which,<br />
in turn, inspired the movingpicture<br />
camera that Thomas<br />
Edison’s laboratories developed<br />
a decade later.<br />
TELEVISION<br />
1927<br />
Philo T. Farnsworth, who spent<br />
much of his childhood on a farm<br />
without electricity, invented<br />
the first working electronic<br />
television in 1927 at the age of<br />
21. He only once appeared on<br />
TV—on the quiz show I’ve Got a<br />
Secret. None of the contestants<br />
had any idea who he was.<br />
VIRTUAL REALITY<br />
1980s<br />
Virtual reality has been around<br />
since at least the 1980s, and<br />
the U.S. military has utilized<br />
it for combat simulation for<br />
nearly as long. Recently, it has<br />
been used—with preliminary<br />
success—to help treat posttraumatic<br />
stress disorder. The<br />
market for consumer-side<br />
virtual- and augmented-reality<br />
video games and mentalhealth<br />
services is expected to<br />
reach $162 billion by 2020.<br />
have brought out favorite treasured<br />
books for her to see. At the National<br />
Library of Scotland, curators showed<br />
her the Bassandyne Bible, the first<br />
to be printed in Scotland. At the Library<br />
of Congress, she was shown the<br />
first Bible printed in the U.S., a version<br />
translated into phonetic Natick<br />
dialect for missionary use. When, in<br />
2011, Tea Party Congressman Robert<br />
Aderholt (R-Alabama) asked to be<br />
sworn in using the first Bible printed<br />
in the nation, he may or may not have<br />
been looking to rest his hand on an<br />
instrument of colonialist oppression.<br />
Or perhaps he intended to signify<br />
something else entirely. Books, after<br />
all, have many meanings, far more<br />
than mere text can contain.<br />
utenberg’s revolution<br />
was not really<br />
about a book. It was<br />
not even about<br />
books. It was about<br />
accessibility. And<br />
looked at that way, the digital revolution<br />
does not supplant print’s project:<br />
It completes it. If you Google “Gutenberg,”<br />
the first result is Project Gutenberg,<br />
which offers free downloadable<br />
e-books. Columbia University Press<br />
and the American Historical Association<br />
have created an online repository<br />
of enhanced history books called<br />
Gutenberg-e. And perhaps the most<br />
disruptive—and controversial—tool<br />
Google has released to date is Google<br />
Books, which allows a nearly comprehensive<br />
catalog of books to be textsearched<br />
and data-mined, without<br />
compensating authors or publishers.<br />
Librarians don’t care primarily<br />
about ink on paper or images on microform<br />
or bytes on disks or digidrops<br />
in the cloud. They care about archiving,<br />
so that citizens, present and<br />
future, can access vast stores of ideas,<br />
and they will use whatever tools serve<br />
that end. Ironically, one of the most<br />
frequent modes of preserving digital<br />
documents is to print them out and<br />
catalog them. Paper and microform<br />
currently have longer shelf lives than<br />
rapidly changing digital formats like<br />
floppy disks or CD-ROMs or USB<br />
drives—and they don’t require special<br />
playback technologies. As for the<br />
cloud, the special vulnerability of<br />
that digital archive was potently illustrated<br />
by the spectacle of scientists<br />
scrambling madly to copy the entire<br />
federal repository of climate data before<br />
the incoming Trump administration<br />
gained the power to delete it.<br />
n the day Donald<br />
Trump took office,<br />
Wightman skirted<br />
messages chalked<br />
in rainbow colors<br />
on the sidewalks of<br />
Yale University: “Engage with others”;<br />
“I have a dream”; “Great again<br />
for all.” She had an appointment with<br />
Ray Clemens, of Yale’s Beinecke Rare<br />
Book & Manuscript Library, who had<br />
taken its Gutenberg Old Testament<br />
from its display case and laid it on a<br />
foam cradle in a classroom. Yale’s B42<br />
is not as gorgeous as the one at Princeton<br />
University’s Scheide Library,<br />
which Wightman had addended the<br />
day before. Princeton’s copy boasts its<br />
original embossed-calfskin binding;<br />
Yale’s has a worn, unremarkable binding,<br />
and its pages were trimmed at<br />
some point, guillotining off the wavy<br />
edges and some of its hand-rubrication.<br />
But Clemens was still excited to<br />
share it, even welcoming some visiting<br />
high school students, who took a<br />
group selfie with it. Wightman and<br />
Clemens paged through the Bible for<br />
about an hour. Then Wightman left,<br />
having delivered 41 of 49 addenda.<br />
Between them, Yale and Princeton<br />
have graduated seven American<br />
presidents. Jeni Wightman’s project<br />
won’t guarantee that science is taught<br />
objectively in all schools, or that nonalternative<br />
facts will triumph over<br />
alternative ones. But it does help us<br />
understand how ideas replicate, how<br />
culture creates structures for the<br />
transmission and preservation and<br />
evolution of knowledge and truth.<br />
How one particular story is never the<br />
end of the story. It reminds us that<br />
print was not the real revolution. The<br />
real revolution was language itself, a<br />
virus, or its own kind of DNA, a way<br />
of encoding and replicating content<br />
separate from the content itself. In<br />
the beginning was the word.<br />
•GINGER STRAND’s most recent<br />
book is The Brothers Vonnegut: Science<br />
and Fiction in the House of Magic.<br />
@GINGERSTRAND<br />
MAY/JUNE <strong>2017</strong> • PSMAG.COM 59
THE<br />
CULTURE<br />
PAGES<br />
WHERE<br />
CULTURE MEETS<br />
CONSCIENCE<br />
A Library as<br />
Large as Africa<br />
The Jalada literary collective has a radical<br />
mission: an ongoing translation effort to unite—<br />
and elevate—African literature.<br />
BY AARON BADY<br />
IT BEGAN WITH a workshop<br />
for young writers in<br />
Nairobi in 2013, organized<br />
by the Kwani Trust and<br />
the British Council. As Moses Kilolo<br />
recalls, he had never attended a writing<br />
workshop before. Like so many of<br />
his peers, he had been toiling alone:<br />
Each day he would haunt his university<br />
library, struggling in his own writing<br />
to imitate the English-language<br />
classics that he found on the shelves.<br />
It was a remarkably well-stocked library,<br />
as he remembers it, the best a<br />
young writer could hope for. Yet while<br />
he had produced a few halting efforts<br />
at prose, he hadn’t yet “come out” as a<br />
writer. He stayed in the stacks. It was<br />
only after the three-day workshop<br />
with a dozen other young writers, he<br />
says, that the brilliance of his peers<br />
pulled him out of the library—helped<br />
him to realize what he could never<br />
accomplish alone. “I wasn’t as good as<br />
60 MAY/JUNE <strong>2017</strong> • PSMAG.COM<br />
PHOTOS BY JERRY RILEY
I thought,” he laughs. “They tore my<br />
work apart! It was moving to know<br />
that there’s so much more possibility.”<br />
The feeling was general among the<br />
workshop’s participants. At first they<br />
stayed in touch out of a spontaneous<br />
desire to keep the conversations<br />
going. But after Okwiri Oduor—who<br />
would win the Caine Prize for African<br />
Writing later in the year—set up<br />
a Google group named Jalada, after<br />
the word for library in Kiswahili, the<br />
group began to evolve into something<br />
more concrete. As the members began<br />
writing, and editing each other’s<br />
work, they also began talking about<br />
what hadn’t been written yet, and<br />
what needed to be. They began building<br />
their own library: A few months<br />
after the workshop, they set up a barebones<br />
website ( jalada.org) where they<br />
published an anthology of original<br />
work loosely themed around the notion<br />
of insanity, Sketch of a Bald Woman<br />
in the Semi-Nude and Other Stories.<br />
It had been an easy choice to publish<br />
on the Internet: It was free, it<br />
was easy, and they had complete control.<br />
As the word spread—and as the<br />
inaugural anthology did the rounds<br />
on social media—they began hearing<br />
from writers across the continent,<br />
asking if they could submit to the<br />
next anthology. Jalada’s editors said<br />
yes. The second collection—Sext Me:<br />
Poems and Stories, on the intersections<br />
of sex and technology, and twice<br />
as long as the first—included a handful<br />
of participants from outside Kenya,<br />
as well as Jalada’s first official call<br />
for submissions. Exactly a year after<br />
the first anthology, Afrofuture(s)—a<br />
three-part shelf-buster of Africanist<br />
speculative fiction—had close to a majority<br />
of non-Kenyan writers.<br />
As the library has grown from a<br />
roomful of young Nairobians to an<br />
ongoing conversation that spans<br />
the continent—with email, Skype,<br />
and social media allowing members<br />
in a half-dozen countries to stay in<br />
touch—it’s become clear that Jalada is<br />
where the future of African literature<br />
is being written. A project with a pan-<br />
Africanist scope might have drowned<br />
under the logistics of communication<br />
and distance, or lost its energy in<br />
fundraising. Instead, meetings have<br />
yielded true mentorships and editorial<br />
relationships, and correspondences<br />
have blossomed into longterm<br />
collaborations, as the contributors<br />
to each anthology have become<br />
a part of the broader network. The<br />
management team remains mostly<br />
Kenyan—allowing semi-regular faceto-face<br />
meetings—but the structure<br />
is as horizontal and outward-looking<br />
as possible. Members from Namibia,<br />
Nigeria, Zimbabwe, South Africa, and<br />
Somalia make up the core group, with<br />
an even broader network of contributors<br />
and collaborators. Richard Ali<br />
in Nigeria and Edwige-Renée DRO<br />
in Côte d’Ivoire have been crucial<br />
to the project’s expanding reach, for<br />
example, both for their editorial expertise<br />
and for connecting Jalada to<br />
new writers in West and Francophone<br />
Africa. Building connections with<br />
North Africa is the next hurdle.<br />
Jalada’s “about” page is brief and to<br />
the point: a “pan-Africanist writers’<br />
collective” whose goal is “to publish<br />
literature by African authors regularly<br />
by making it as easy as possible<br />
for any member to publish anything.”<br />
This tautology—their goal is to<br />
publish the things they are publishing—tells<br />
a story of its own: Jalada is<br />
just the work itself, without money,<br />
pretensions, or ego. The anthologies<br />
don’t have introductions, nor are<br />
there mission statements or manifestos;<br />
there is only the writing.<br />
As with anything new and experimental,<br />
the quality of the writing is<br />
uneven: Sometimes raw and incandescent,<br />
it’s as likely to be interestingly<br />
incoherent as heart-stoppingly<br />
precise. But the collective is bigger<br />
than the sum of its parts, and the<br />
project’s ambitions are transformative.<br />
By self-publishing online—and<br />
by working in a spirit of collective<br />
collaboration—Jalada’s themes in its<br />
first year of existence form a checklist<br />
of the topics that someone like Moses<br />
Kilolo might struggle to find on the<br />
shelves of a Nairobi library: insan-<br />
and the future.<br />
ity, sex, technology,<br />
Because a top-heavy pantheon of<br />
(mostly male) writers<br />
from the 1960s<br />
and ’70s has dominated African literary<br />
publishing for decades, African<br />
literature has often been backwardlooking<br />
and history-oriented. Jalada<br />
made a clean break, even establishing<br />
a commitment to gender parity from<br />
the beginning. (Original contributor<br />
Anne Moraa was blasé when I asked<br />
her about this: “If you are open to the<br />
best work, you will achieve gender<br />
parity by default,” she said, though<br />
she also gave credit to the original<br />
workshop for being gender balanced.)<br />
In 2015, Jalada began its most<br />
ambitious project yet: to go beyond<br />
the handful of colonial languages in<br />
which most African writers write—<br />
English, French, Portuguese, and<br />
Arabic—and explore the thousands of<br />
mother tongues that the vast majority<br />
of the continent’s people speak. With<br />
more than 3,000 languages spoken<br />
by significant populations, Africa’s<br />
everyday polylingualism defies most<br />
Western understanding. In Kenya,<br />
for example, it’s common to speak<br />
one language in the streets, another<br />
in school, and another in the family<br />
home (Swahili, English, and an<br />
ethnic or tribal language like Kamba,<br />
Kikuyu, or Luo). But exceptions<br />
outweigh even this very rough norm;<br />
Nairobi urbanites might speak Sheng<br />
more than either Swahili or English<br />
(the languages of which it is a patois),<br />
while interethnic families tend to<br />
speak multiple languages. Anywhere<br />
you find immigrant communities<br />
(which is everywhere), the linguistic<br />
cocktail gets mixed in yet other ways.<br />
The only generalization one can<br />
venture is this: If there’s one thing that<br />
unites Africa—that nearly all Africans<br />
have in common—it’s the same polylingualism<br />
that divides it, an irony that<br />
has haunted African literature since<br />
its beginnings. It has taken a project<br />
like Jalada to do something about it.<br />
BEFORE COLONIZATION and the imposition<br />
of European languages, the<br />
continent’s poetics were oral, dis-<br />
MAY/JUNE <strong>2017</strong> • PSMAG.COM 61
THE CULTURE PAGES<br />
persed across Ewe, Shona, Kiswahili,<br />
Luganda, Igbo, and thousands of other<br />
languages. When African literature began<br />
to be written, published, and read<br />
in the early part of the 20 th century, it<br />
was in the context of imperialist globalization,<br />
a Pan-Africanism that was<br />
invariably expressed in the languages<br />
of the colonizers. Indeed, English,<br />
French, Portuguese, and Arabic provided<br />
the literary infrastructure that<br />
brought writers and readers across<br />
Africa into contact with each other,<br />
sometimes for the first time in history:<br />
Nigerians could read Kenyans in English,<br />
Ivorians could read Mauritanians<br />
in French, and novels by Tayeb Salih of<br />
Sudan (in Arabic) or Pepetela of Angola<br />
(Portuguese) could crisscross the<br />
continent in translation. But that was<br />
where it usually stopped; translations<br />
from African languages were rare (and<br />
mostly ethnographic), while translations<br />
between African languages were<br />
almost non-existent.<br />
For most African writers, then and<br />
now, the languages of the former colonizers<br />
have been the only pragmatic<br />
choice. Faced with a nation speaking<br />
over 300 languages, for example, Chinua<br />
Achebe wrote in English, the only<br />
language most Nigerians shared. Rare<br />
exceptions prove the rule: When Ngugi<br />
wa Thiong’o vowed to write only<br />
in his native Gikuyu, in the 1970s,<br />
his polemic made waves but few converts.<br />
His manifesto, Decolonizing the<br />
Mind, has been debated and fought<br />
over for decades and remains a lightning<br />
rod for controversy in African<br />
literary circles. But the cruel irony is<br />
that most still read him in English.<br />
Without a strong Gikuyu publishing<br />
industry—in a country where Gikuyu<br />
speakers make up around 20 percent<br />
of the population—even Ngugi’s main<br />
Kenyan audience will always read<br />
him in English translation.<br />
In 2015, Jalada published an anthology<br />
of original stories and poems both<br />
in the authors’ own respective languages<br />
(many of which were African)<br />
and in a variety of translations. Kilolo’s<br />
“An Empty Wall,” for example, is presented<br />
both in English and in Junior<br />
Moyo’s Ndebele translation (a language<br />
spoken in Zimbabwe). Edwige-<br />
Renée DRO wrote “Pneu Secours” in<br />
French and translated it into English<br />
herself, while Mazhun Idris made the<br />
translation into Hausa (spoken in<br />
northern Nigeria). But this was just<br />
a prelude to the group’s most striking<br />
translation project: In the next<br />
anthology, they took a story donated<br />
by Ngugi wa Thiong’o (“Ituika Ria<br />
Murungaru” in Kikuyu, “The Upright<br />
Revolution” in English) and translated<br />
it into 62 languages (and counting).<br />
While the accomplishment is remarkable,<br />
of course, the anthology<br />
can’t really be read in the conventional<br />
manner at all: Few can read<br />
Ngugi’s folkloric parable about why<br />
humans walk upright in more than a<br />
handful of the languages that the anthology<br />
offers. Rather, the point is to<br />
imagine a different kind of library. “At<br />
a personal level, what Jalada has done<br />
is akin to recapturing stolen lands,” as<br />
founding editor Richard Oduor Oduku<br />
told me. “We have recaptured the<br />
authority to imagine our own futures,<br />
including what languages we will, or<br />
we can, employ.” This sentiment was<br />
general among the translators I spoke<br />
with; Rwandan Louise Umutoni, for<br />
example, described translation into<br />
European languages as a kind of brain<br />
drain, and explained that, instead of<br />
Africa’s literary resources enriching<br />
languages like English, Jalada reversed<br />
the flow, translating European<br />
works into African languages starved<br />
for the written literary word.<br />
In November, Jalada staged a reading<br />
of the story in Nairobi, in seven<br />
languages: Sheng, Kiswahili, Dholuo,<br />
Kikuyu, Kiluhya, Kinyarwanda, and<br />
English. Few in the audience would<br />
have been fluent in more than a few<br />
of them. But, as Kilolo recalled, the<br />
revelation was seeing seven different<br />
languages in the same place, before<br />
the same audience, uniting rather<br />
than dividing. “People were thrilled<br />
to see so many languages at once,” he<br />
said. “We have to do away with the<br />
notion that speaking a different language<br />
divides people.”<br />
•AARON BADY is a writer in Oakland<br />
and an editor at The New Inquiry.<br />
@ZUNGUZUNGU<br />
<strong>Pacific</strong><br />
<strong>Standard</strong><br />
Picks<br />
BY KRISTINA KUTATELI<br />
TWITTER AND TEAR GAS<br />
Thanks to social media,<br />
launching a global<br />
movement is now as simple<br />
as pressing send. In modern<br />
movements, the Internet<br />
has mobilized hundreds of<br />
thousands of protesters and<br />
organized vital aid. But how<br />
effective are Twitter and<br />
Facebook, really? A new<br />
book by Zeynep Tufekci<br />
promises to provide some<br />
answers. Incorporating a<br />
decade’s experience spent<br />
studying social movements,<br />
Tufekci outlines how new<br />
networked protests form.<br />
Using social theory and onthe-ground<br />
analysis, Tufekci<br />
finds that the outcomes<br />
of 21 st -century movements<br />
like Occupy Wall Street<br />
aren’t proportional to the<br />
energy they inspire on<br />
social media—spreading the<br />
message across easy-toaccess,<br />
fast-moving apps<br />
doesn’t necessarily lead<br />
to lasting social change.<br />
Still, Tufekci doesn’t<br />
dismiss the power of<br />
networked protest. Twitter,<br />
she ultimately concedes,<br />
may influence citizens’<br />
perceptions of their state’s<br />
legitimacy more than world<br />
leaders may think.<br />
FOR MORE SELECTIONS FROM<br />
OUR CULTURE WRITERS AND<br />
EDITORS, VISIT PSMAG.COM.<br />
62 MAY/JUNE <strong>2017</strong> • PSMAG.COM
WHERE CULTURE MEETS CONSCIENCE<br />
The Refugees’ Theater<br />
As the population of displaced Syrians swells in<br />
Germany, one storytelling series aims to expedite<br />
integration through first-person narrative.<br />
ON AN EMPTY STAGE, Ahmad Kalaji<br />
re-enacts the footsteps that took him<br />
from his house to the local shop where<br />
he used to buy cigarettes in Syria: 46<br />
steps there, 32 on the way back. One<br />
day his path to the shop was interrupted.<br />
Kalaji was just six steps away<br />
when he saw two men with guns—a<br />
new military checkpoint. Syria’s<br />
civil war, a vicious conflict sparked by<br />
President Bashar al-Assad’s violent<br />
repression of the 2011 Arab uprisings,<br />
had reached his neighborhood.<br />
Over the days that followed, the<br />
checkpoint mushroomed. “Now there<br />
are many soldiers,” Kalaji tells the audience.<br />
“Cement walls. Wires. A steel<br />
gate.” Eventually, he stopped counting<br />
his steps. His story slips from past<br />
to present: That’s why he later moved<br />
here, to Berlin, he says.<br />
Kalaji, expressive by nature, told<br />
his story as part of Storytelling<br />
Arena’s Syrian Series, a Berlin-based<br />
program of live narrative events run<br />
by Scottish theater producer Rachel<br />
Clarke. Stories are written and read<br />
by the city’s refugee community,<br />
though, as Kalaji speaks, light shines<br />
on the silent audience as well. With<br />
BY MORGAN MEAKER<br />
this, the production hints at a larger<br />
message: that success of the country’s<br />
“welcome culture”—a phrase<br />
that embodies Germany’s open-door<br />
policy—is not only the responsibility<br />
of its refugees, but also of its locals.<br />
In 2016, Germany suffered three<br />
terror attacks. Each incident has<br />
fueled concerns that migrants introduce<br />
greater instability into society.<br />
Throughout the Syrian crisis, Chancellor<br />
Angela Merkel has called for<br />
tolerance—for Germany to stand by<br />
its humanitarian values. But a December<br />
speech marked a shift to the<br />
political right. Merkel said that the<br />
full-face veil should be “forbidden<br />
wherever legally possible,” calling for<br />
the country’s migrant population to<br />
adopt a German “way of life.”<br />
Jenny Phillimore, a British expert<br />
on migrant integration, explains this<br />
approach as assimilation, a system<br />
where migrants are expected to<br />
“become just like us.” The alternative,<br />
Phillimore says, is integration,<br />
“where there is an expectation that<br />
the host population will adapt to the<br />
new levels of diversity, and the migrant<br />
population will adapt as well.”<br />
Although the European Union clearly<br />
defines the process of integration as<br />
“a dynamic, two-way process,” national<br />
governments across the bloc<br />
regularly use the word to refer to assimilationist<br />
policies.<br />
At each Storytelling Arena event,<br />
the audience is a mixture of Germans<br />
and Syrians, representing the new<br />
fabric of Berlin. Throughout the<br />
shows, the two nationalities reveal<br />
their similarities but also their differences—they<br />
speak different languages,<br />
laugh at different jokes, and clap at<br />
different points in the music.<br />
The events are multi-lingual. Stories<br />
are usually told in Arabic translated<br />
into German or English. (Kalaji’s<br />
was told only in English.)<br />
In 2016, a group of leading German<br />
social scientists surveyed over 5,000<br />
Germans about their exposure to and<br />
attitudes toward new arrivals. Despite<br />
a national climate of intense controversy<br />
around immigration issues, they<br />
found that native Germans who had<br />
more interactions with migrants were<br />
more optimistic about co-existence—<br />
echoing decades of research that also<br />
found a relationship between tolerance<br />
and exposure to diversity.<br />
Kalaji says he hopes storytelling<br />
helps Berliners feel empathy toward<br />
refugees; he doesn’t want their sympathy.<br />
“Empathy comes from the<br />
heart,” he says, explaining the difference.<br />
“It’s like, if someone was in<br />
a dark hole, you would go down and<br />
stay with the person and be in his<br />
shoes. Sympathy is just looking down<br />
the hole to tell the person: ‘It’s dark<br />
down there. Hang on.’”<br />
Back in the Berlin theater, it’s time<br />
for the intermission. But Kalaji’s descriptions<br />
of his quiet Syrian neighborhood<br />
are still present: Conversations<br />
are stuck on the stories just told as<br />
theatergoers intermingle. “After the<br />
performance, everyone talks together—they<br />
get to know each other,” storyteller<br />
Firas Al Younis says. After the<br />
performance, the Syrian tale is also no<br />
longer just a headline. It feels human.<br />
•MORGAN MEAKER is a human-rights<br />
journalist covering Europe and the<br />
MENA region. @MORGANMEAKER<br />
PHOTO COURTESY OF STORYTELLING ARENA<br />
MAY/JUNE <strong>2017</strong> • PSMAG.COM 63
THE CULTURE PAGES<br />
Standing Up<br />
for Transgender<br />
Acceptance<br />
In their California comedy<br />
show, couple Robin Tran and<br />
Cate Gary share their complex<br />
love story—and normalize<br />
comedy about gender<br />
transitions in the process.<br />
BY JENNIFER PURDIE<br />
ON A SUNDAY NIGHT in Los Angeles,<br />
the audience at Tao Comedy Studio, a<br />
quaint, New Age-y performance space<br />
four blocks south of swanky Melrose Avenue,<br />
snaps to attention. An Asian woman<br />
wearing a knee-length black dress<br />
and red sweater has taken the stage<br />
beneath a hanging yin-yang charm; she<br />
removes the microphone and places its<br />
stand behind her. “My name is Robin<br />
Tran. I’m transgender, and that’s a coincidence.<br />
A lot of people think I transitioned<br />
for one pun. Can you believe<br />
that?” She lands her set’s first laugh.<br />
Tran’s material—ranging from her<br />
appearance as a transgender woman<br />
to grocery shopping—is memorable,<br />
as was the opening act: Tran was<br />
preceded by her girlfriend, Cate<br />
Gary, a redhead with a stark, cropped<br />
haircut who joked about religiousfanatic<br />
groups that think transgender<br />
people are making their identities up.<br />
(“Seems like a dangerous road for religious<br />
people to choose.”) After both<br />
Gary and Tran finish their individual<br />
sets, an assistant places a second microphone<br />
stand on the stage and they<br />
begin a side-by-side routine that tells<br />
an untraditional love story.<br />
Their duo act, “Unconventional Lesbians,”<br />
which Tran and Gary have performed<br />
at 90-minute shows like this<br />
one since October of 2015, starts with<br />
an anecdote about how they met. Tran<br />
first encountered Gary at an open mic<br />
in April of 2012, before she came out as<br />
transgender. When they began seeing<br />
each other at stand-up events around<br />
Orange County, they flirted, but only<br />
onstage. Six months into their acquaintance<br />
Tran asked Gary out. Gary<br />
was reluctant at first, mentioning she’s<br />
“very damaged” and a “life-ruiner.”<br />
Gary adjusts the microphone as<br />
she describes dating Robert—Robin’s<br />
birth name. Tran struggled to feel<br />
like the man in the relationship. She<br />
headed to the gym to make herself<br />
look and feel bigger than Gary; she<br />
often asked, “Am I man enough for<br />
you?” At home, their relationship was<br />
sometimes tense, Gary says. “I asked<br />
her, do you love me as much as you<br />
hate yourself?” Gary shakes her head<br />
no, giving the audience Tran’s answer.<br />
The scales were tipped when Robin<br />
came out in 2015, two years into their<br />
relationship. How she relayed that<br />
insight to her girlfriend forms the<br />
vignette’s punch line: “Like how any<br />
good boyfriend comes out to her girlfriend,<br />
I Facebook messaged her.”<br />
“No more work got done that day,”<br />
Gary retorts, her voice getting a notch<br />
louder than Tran’s.<br />
The show ultimately has a happy<br />
ending: Gary and Tran decided to stay<br />
together, and they began performing<br />
“Unconventional Lesbians” eight<br />
months after Tran officially came out<br />
to Gary. Most friends responded well<br />
to both of their life-altering decisions.<br />
After the show, Gary says, “We could<br />
finally be ourselves too.”<br />
Onstage, however, being themselves<br />
means jockeying for attention at a<br />
moment when cisgender men are still<br />
the main commercial players in standup.<br />
Though transgender comedians<br />
like Julia Scotti and Ian Harvie have<br />
become name brands in recent years,<br />
in the first eight months of 2016, of 58<br />
comedians who performed stand-up<br />
sets on late-night television, only 16<br />
were women. As of this past October,<br />
only one trans man, Ian Harvie, had<br />
received a green light to film a standup<br />
comedy special. “When I first walk<br />
up on stage, most people are taken<br />
aback,” Tran says. “Everyone stops<br />
talking. I would say they are confused<br />
and amused at the same time.”<br />
Still, Tran views being a nonconformist<br />
in comedy as an asset: “I<br />
get some chuckling before I even say<br />
something. <strong>Standard</strong>s are low, which<br />
makes it easy to overcome them.” Gary<br />
acknowledges that the crowd also helps<br />
to make “Unconventional Lesbians” a<br />
success. She says that most attendees<br />
learn about them on Facebook ahead<br />
of time, and so they don’t often face<br />
preconceived, broad judgments about<br />
transgender people like they might in<br />
front of a standard comedy audience.<br />
But the performance seems to erode<br />
discomfort from the room as well.<br />
When Gary tells the audience at Tao,<br />
“We’re a very offensive couple—our existence<br />
offends people,” she enunciates<br />
every word for extra emphasis, eliciting<br />
the night’s loudest laughs. Gary<br />
is using a time-tested joke-writing<br />
strategy: Laugh at yourself in a truthful<br />
way, and the audience feels that it has<br />
permission to laugh along with you.<br />
With that, Tran thanks everyone for<br />
coming, and she and Gary place the<br />
microphones back into their stands. As<br />
any good comedian knows, you end the<br />
show when you get a big last laugh.<br />
•JENNIFER PURDIE is a writer in<br />
Southern California. @JENPURDIE<br />
64 MAY/JUNE <strong>2017</strong> • PSMAG.COM<br />
ILLUSTRATIONS BY ELIAS STEIN
WHERE CULTURE MEETS CONSCIENCE<br />
MEMOIR<br />
Just Mercy<br />
Lawyer Bryan Stevenson<br />
profiles clients of his<br />
Alabama-based Equal<br />
Justice Initiative,<br />
including Walter<br />
McMillian, wrongfully<br />
accused of murder, and<br />
Evan Miller, originally<br />
sentenced to life without<br />
parole at 14.<br />
Why<br />
“I just don’t think that<br />
white people have any<br />
clue that they live in a<br />
completely different<br />
world, and that the<br />
justice system is unfair.<br />
Stevenson is just so<br />
absolutely profound in<br />
the way that he talked<br />
about how we can help.”<br />
GUEST PROGRAMMER:<br />
Anita Kunz<br />
As Told to Katie Kilkenny<br />
FILM<br />
• Award-winning artist and<br />
illustrator Anita Kunz may be<br />
Canadian, but for over 30 years<br />
she has been creating illustrations<br />
and covers for America’s most<br />
iconic magazines. Among the<br />
over 2,000 illustrations she<br />
has produced since she began<br />
magazine work in 1980, Kunz has<br />
depicted then-First Lady Hillary<br />
Clinton as Joan of Arc for The<br />
New York Times Magazine and<br />
George W. Bush riding a horse into<br />
Iraq with blinders on for The New<br />
Yorker (Bush was the one wearing<br />
the blinders). She has long urged<br />
readers to reconsider social and<br />
political events in the United States<br />
and is working on a new project<br />
that draws deeply from art history.<br />
“I just don’t<br />
think that<br />
white people<br />
have any clue<br />
that they live<br />
in a completely<br />
different world,<br />
and that the<br />
justice system<br />
is profoundly<br />
unfair.”<br />
VISIT PSMAG.COM FOR MORE OF<br />
KUNZ’S RECOMMENDATIONS.<br />
ILLUSTRATOR<br />
NOVELIST<br />
The Piano<br />
Jane Campion’s film<br />
about a mute mother<br />
coming to terms with life<br />
in an arranged marriage<br />
was a surprise hit when<br />
it debuted in 1993. Made<br />
for $7 million, the film<br />
became New Zealand’s<br />
most successful<br />
international film ever.<br />
Jillian Tamaki<br />
Canadian illustrator and<br />
artist Jillian Tamaki is<br />
perhaps best known<br />
for the graphic novels<br />
she’s created with her<br />
cousin Mariko Tamaki,<br />
including Skim and This<br />
One Summer, the first<br />
graphic novel to receive<br />
a Caldecott Honor.<br />
Ian McEwan<br />
Though English novelist<br />
Ian McEwan first made<br />
his name writing gothic<br />
fables, in the last few<br />
decades his novels<br />
have veered toward<br />
realism, subsequently<br />
incorporating<br />
some sharp social<br />
commentary.<br />
Why<br />
“There was something<br />
about that movie. The<br />
quality of the filmmaking<br />
was really haunting.<br />
I love really great<br />
storytelling, but because<br />
I’m so visual, it’s such<br />
an added treat when [a<br />
film] is just as profoundly<br />
beautiful as this.”<br />
Why<br />
“I was invited to judge<br />
an award for the big<br />
graphic-novel and comics<br />
community, so I got to<br />
read a lot of these and<br />
they’re just astonishing—<br />
so authentic and very<br />
personal. I do one-off<br />
images, but these are<br />
really well-told stories.”<br />
Why<br />
“There are always these<br />
social concerns. There<br />
was one that had to do<br />
with somebody who had<br />
a stalker, there was one<br />
about climate change—<br />
they’re topical subjects<br />
that merit discussing,<br />
but he wraps a cloak of<br />
fiction around them.”<br />
PHOTO COURTESY OF ANITA KUNZ<br />
MAY/JUNE <strong>2017</strong> • PSMAG.COM 65
THE CULTURE PAGES<br />
Divided by Design<br />
A magisterial new book tracks how the government segregated<br />
America—and how new policy, and new education, could save us.<br />
BY PETER C. BAKER<br />
Shelf Help<br />
The Boy Who Loved<br />
Too Much: A True Story of<br />
Pathological Friendliness<br />
• Jennifer Latson<br />
• Simon & Schuster<br />
Jennifer Latson’s impressively<br />
intimate debut follows three<br />
years in the childhood of Eli,<br />
who is one of approximately<br />
30,000 Americans with a<br />
genetic disorder called Williams<br />
syndrome. People with Williams<br />
can have cardiac problems,<br />
learning disabilities, motor<br />
complications—and a neartotal<br />
lack of social inhibitions.<br />
Hungry for connection and<br />
friendship, Eli is irrepressibly<br />
open with every stranger he<br />
meets; inevitably this backfires,<br />
instantly marking him as<br />
“different.” Watson intersperses<br />
evocative scenes from Eli’s life<br />
as he approaches high school<br />
with the history of the disorder.<br />
The emotional heart of the<br />
story is Eli’s relationship with<br />
his single mother, Gayle, who<br />
struggles with the impossible<br />
question of how to protect<br />
her too-trusting son while<br />
simultaneously preparing him<br />
to chart his own path in a world<br />
that is often dangerous for its<br />
least-skeptical souls.<br />
—PETER C. BAKER<br />
By all metrics, American<br />
housing is a world of selfperpetuating<br />
racial segregation.<br />
Black and white<br />
Americans, in particular, rarely live<br />
together.<br />
There is a strong tendency to view<br />
this phenomenon as the vexing, aggregate<br />
result of an uncountable number<br />
of local, uncoordinated decisions<br />
made mostly in the past. That story<br />
goes roughly like this: Historically,<br />
when black families tried to move<br />
into white neighborhoods, they would<br />
often be stymied by discriminatory<br />
sellers, real estate agents, or mortgage<br />
lenders. Whenever black families<br />
managed to clear these hurdles (and<br />
weren’t subsequently chased out by<br />
racial harassment), their prejudiced<br />
white neighbors would panic and<br />
start fleeing, often encouraged by opportunistic<br />
house-flippers. Property<br />
values would plummet, tax revenues<br />
would decline, and the cycle of neighborhood<br />
deterioration would begin.<br />
Today, black residents of these depressed<br />
neighborhoods rarely make<br />
enough money to move anywhere<br />
“nicer.” The cycle continues.<br />
Every piece of this story is, on its<br />
own, true. It all happened. Most of<br />
it still happens. But, as historian<br />
Richard Rothstein argues in his magisterial<br />
new book The Color of Law,<br />
the story is radically incomplete and<br />
lays the primary blame at the wrong<br />
doorsteps. Rothstein doesn’t let individual<br />
or neighborhood prejudice off<br />
the hook, nor does he deny the major<br />
role played by present-day income<br />
inequality. He insists, though, that<br />
contemporary segregation, far from<br />
being de facto or accidental, would<br />
not have come to exist without active<br />
encouragement by government: local,<br />
state, and—most of all—federal.<br />
The government policies Rothstein<br />
catalogs have all been documented<br />
and linked to segregation by other<br />
historians, but they have never been<br />
marshaled so comprehensively or with<br />
such rhetorical force. The Color of Law<br />
is that rarest of books: a detailed policy<br />
history powerful enough to shape not<br />
only your opinion but also your daily<br />
experience of the world.<br />
The first major chapter in the history<br />
of government-imposed segregation<br />
came during the Depression, when<br />
the New Deal Public Works Administration<br />
started building housing projects<br />
for the lower middle class. These<br />
projects were segregated as a matter<br />
of policy. White projects could only<br />
be built in officially designated white<br />
neighborhoods, and black projects in<br />
officially designated black neighborhoods.<br />
Previously, many lower-middleclass<br />
neighborhoods had been racially<br />
integrated, a possibility that the PWA<br />
policy did not recognize. In multiple<br />
cities, integrated neighborhoods were<br />
simply razed to the ground.<br />
The private market was nearly as<br />
segregated. Most local governments<br />
used zoning schemes intentionally<br />
designed to separate the races. A 1917<br />
Supreme Court decision made such<br />
practices illegal, but it was easy enough<br />
for municipalities to ignore the law, or<br />
find workarounds that targeted race<br />
without using racial language. The federal<br />
government helped: A presidential<br />
committee of outspoken segregationists<br />
in the Harding administration published<br />
a manual of best zoning practices<br />
obviously designed to help whites<br />
keep their neighborhoods white.<br />
Crypto-racist zoning was powerful,<br />
but imperfect. It couldn’t stop welloff<br />
blacks who had fought their way<br />
into the professional classes from trying<br />
to move into middle-class white<br />
neighborhoods. That would require a<br />
more substantial intervention: a fun-<br />
66 MAY/JUNE <strong>2017</strong> • PSMAG.COM
WHERE CULTURE MEETS CONSCIENCE<br />
Color of w:<br />
A Forgotten History of<br />
How Our Government<br />
Segregated America<br />
• Richard Rothstein<br />
• Liveright<br />
damental reshaping of the American<br />
housing landscape.<br />
Before the 1930s, it was almost impossible<br />
for middle-class renters to<br />
purchase homes. Hoping to encourage<br />
them—home ownership was thought<br />
to inoculate citizens against communism—the<br />
federal government created<br />
mortgage-support programs like the<br />
Federal Housing Administration. The<br />
FHA insured bank mortgages, making<br />
them accessible to large swathes of the<br />
middle class for the first time. But in<br />
order to qualify for FHA protection, a<br />
house had to be in a “low-risk” neighborhood.<br />
And in order to be deemed<br />
low-risk, a neighborhood had to be<br />
entirely white. Mere proximity to a<br />
black neighborhood could be disqualifying.<br />
Neighborhoods were rewarded<br />
by the FHA for segregated schools; for<br />
restrictive neighborhood covenants<br />
banning future sales to non-whites;<br />
and for highways, boulevards, and other<br />
physical barriers that discouraged<br />
interracial mingling. Most favored of<br />
all were houses that were outside of<br />
racially mixed cities altogether, in new<br />
suburban subdivisions that could be<br />
guaranteed all-white from the start.<br />
Therefore, with extremely rare exceptions,<br />
only white Americans were<br />
in a position to accrue home equity—a<br />
reserve they could use to weather<br />
financial storms without moving, to<br />
fund their retirements, or to leave an<br />
inheritance to their children. Black<br />
Americans, by contrast, were increasingly<br />
forced into crowded neighborhoods<br />
and put at the mercy of slumlords<br />
and predatory lenders. Even after<br />
the discriminatory policies that had<br />
created these divisions ceased to exist,<br />
the divisions remained. Black households<br />
have less family wealth, which in<br />
America tends to mean less education,<br />
less access to work, less income, and<br />
less freedom to live where you please.<br />
For Rothstein, this is about more<br />
than setting the record straight. If contemporary<br />
segregation is traceable to<br />
government initiatives, he says, then<br />
it calls for a government remedy—not<br />
just morally, but legally. His case rests<br />
on the Thirteenth Amendment, which<br />
abolished slavery, and on the 1866<br />
Civil Rights Act, which prohibited actions<br />
that treated former slaves like<br />
second-class citizens. Crucially, the<br />
law explicitly mentions housing discrimination.<br />
On Rothstein’s reading,<br />
this means that government is legally<br />
obligated to fight segregation.<br />
As recently as 2007, Supreme Court<br />
Chief Justice John Roberts expressed<br />
his official opinion that housing segregation<br />
was the consequence of private<br />
discrimination, not law or government<br />
policy. In 2015, the Obama administration<br />
instated a new rule that required<br />
municipalities across the country to<br />
gather statistics on segregation and<br />
formulate plans to fight it. As this issue<br />
goes to press, it seems certain the<br />
Trump administration will axe that requirement.<br />
(In Rothstein’s estimation,<br />
it was unlikely to succeed anyway.)<br />
In the end, he offers a suggestion<br />
as depressing as it is inspiring: literal<br />
textbook reform. Almost no American<br />
schoolchildren learn that segregation<br />
has been government policy. <strong>Standard</strong><br />
textbooks elide the issue, stressing<br />
instead the individual roles played by<br />
our regrettably prejudiced ancestors.<br />
Some future Supreme Court justice is<br />
studying American history right now.<br />
What is she learning? Maybe it’s time<br />
to start paying closer attention.<br />
•PETER C. BAKER is a <strong>Pacific</strong> <strong>Standard</strong><br />
contributing editor in Illinois.<br />
Shelf Help<br />
Islamophobia and<br />
Racism in America<br />
• Erik Love<br />
• New York University Press<br />
This ambitious sociological<br />
study presents two arguments<br />
about Islamophobia in America.<br />
The first is that, while the<br />
term implies a purely religious<br />
prejudice, Islamophobia is best<br />
understood as a form of racism<br />
against many Americans who—<br />
regardless of their religion,<br />
geographic heritage, or ethnic<br />
identity—get sorted as racially<br />
“Middle Eastern” or “Muslim.”<br />
The second is that most Muslim,<br />
Arab, Sikh, and South Asian<br />
advocacy groups have generally<br />
opted to use a “colorblind”<br />
approach that eschews<br />
identifying Islamophobia as<br />
racism. In Love’s view, this<br />
strategy has prevented these<br />
groups from forming coalitions<br />
that could meaningfully resist a<br />
unified prejudice that, like it or<br />
not, affects them all. Whether<br />
you agree or not, the book<br />
is invaluable for its detailed<br />
chronicle of Muslim-American<br />
activism and its careful<br />
attention to the fascinating<br />
complexities, dilemmas, and<br />
paradoxes of racial identity.<br />
—PETER C. BAKER<br />
MAY/JUNE <strong>2017</strong> • PSMAG.COM 67
THE CULTURE PAGES<br />
ONE LAST THING<br />
OBJECTS THAT MATTER<br />
Party<br />
Plates<br />
PHOTO BY JARREN VINK<br />
For Ohioans, the 21 st century’s scarlet<br />
letter is not a crimson character on the<br />
chests of adulterers, but rather a yellow<br />
license plate reserved for drunk drivers.<br />
Ohio and Minnesota are the only<br />
states that currently require offenders to<br />
use specialized license plates, but at least<br />
14 other states have introduced similar<br />
legislation. Proponents say marked<br />
plates—also known as party plates—<br />
serve as an effective deterrent against<br />
drunk driving and warn anyone sharing<br />
the road to be vigilant. Others argue they<br />
encourage police profiling. Experts agree<br />
on one thing, though: We’re likely to see<br />
more criminal registries and public notification<br />
schemes in the future.<br />
Public shame as punishment goes<br />
back centuries; Napoleon, for example,<br />
branded convicted criminals with a hot<br />
iron, which served both as punishment<br />
and as a permanent criminal record.<br />
Public criminal registries, which took<br />
off in the 1990s to track sex offenders,<br />
serve similar purposes today. Now<br />
there are registries for drug dealers,<br />
animal abusers, even dangerous dogs.<br />
Yet there is little evidence that registries<br />
prevent first-time offenses or reduce<br />
recidivism. At worst, they can effectively<br />
impose lifelong punishments.<br />
With criminal justice reform sweeping<br />
the country, politicians looking<br />
to cut budgets without appearing soft<br />
on crime may swap prison sentences<br />
for punishments that leverage social<br />
control. As Nathaniel Hawthorne ominously<br />
wrote in The Scarlet Letter, “he<br />
will be known!”<br />
—MEGHAN WALSH<br />
Public support for<br />
criminal registries<br />
has grown despite<br />
inconsistent evidence<br />
that they reduce crime,<br />
which social scientists<br />
attribute to a human<br />
need to feel a sense of<br />
control over threats.<br />
68 MAY/JUNE <strong>2017</strong> • PSMAG.COM
NATURE<br />
HYDR ATES<br />
Did you know that each person needs<br />
20-50 liters<br />
of fresh water a day to meet their basic needs<br />
for drinking, cooking and cleaning? *<br />
By preserving and restoring essential lands upstream, we help strengthen<br />
the natural flow, filtration and regulation of watersheds that supply drinking<br />
water to people across Latin America, North America and Africa.<br />
How can you help meet nature’s needs? Learn by visiting nature.org/water.<br />
* World Water Assessment Programme (WWAP)