Pacific_Standard__MayJune_2017_

Revolutionary Ideas 

PLUS: 

SIX VISIONARIES 

PROVING IT'S NEVER 

TOO LATE TO MAKE 

A DIFFERENCE. 

P.42 

STORIES 

THAT MATTER 

MAY/JUNE 2017 

PSMAG.COM 

• • • 

REVISING 

THE 

BIBLE 

P.54 

RETURNING 

ANIMALS 

TO NATIVE 

AMERICAN 

LAND 

P.22 

THIS 

YEAR'S 

MOST 

EXCITING 

YOUNG 

MINDS 

AND: 

THE MYTH 

OF ENDLESS 

GROWTH 

WHAT 

ECONOMISTS 

GET WRONG 

ABOUT THE 

FUTURE. P.46 

0 74470 26607 5 

VOL.10 • NO.03 

06 

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VOLUME 10, NUMBER 03 

THE IDEA THAT ECONOMIC 

GROWTH CAN CONTINUE FOREVER ON A 

FINITE PLANET IS THE UNIFYING FAITH OF 

INDUSTRIAL CIVILIZATION. P.46 

Photo by Alejandro Durán 

AMANECER, 2011

PROUD 

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OF THE 

2017 

National 

Magazine 

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FOR FEATURE 

PHOTOGRAPHY 

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EDITOR-IN-CHIEF 

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CONTENTS 

FEATURES MAY/JUNE 2017 


29 

REVOLUTIONS HIDING 

IN PLAIN SIGHT 

You can find a radical 

history in even the most 

commonplace object. Here 

are four everyday things 

that represent a turn in the 

way we live. 

By Malcolm Harris 

34 

42 

46 

54 

THE 30 TOP THINKERS 

UNDER 30 

This year’s most exciting 

young thinkers and 

advocates in policy and 

social justice. 

By Avital Andrews 

& Rosie Spinks 

CHANGING THE WORLD 

AFTER 80 

These visionaries did some 

of their most important 

work after retirement— 

proving that you’re 

never too old to make a 

difference. 

By Avital Andrews 

THE FALLACY OF ENDLESS 

GROWTH 

What economists get wrong 

about the future. 

By Christopher Ketcham 

REVISING THE BIBLE 

Evolutionary biology meets 

Adam and Eve in the 

archives. 

By Ginger Strand 

PHOTO BY JARREN VINK 

MAY/JUNE 2017 • PSMAG.COM 3

Because we need 

Robert’s 

more places where 

we can dream 

We all need places to get outside—to explore, exercise, and recharge. But with America’s 

open spaces disappearing at a rate of 6,000 acres each day, we’re at risk of losing our 

most cherished outdoor escapes. Together, we can change that. Join The Trust for Public 

Land to save the lands we all love—from urban parks to vast wilderness. Since 1972, we’ve 

worked with communities to protect more than 3 million acres and create more than 

5,000 parks and natural places for people to enjoy. Help to keep this land our land. 

Share why nature matters to you: tpl.org/ourland #ourland 

THE 

TRUST 

FOR 

PUBLIC 

LAND

CONTENTS 

DEPARTMENTS MAY/JUNE 2017 


PRIMER 

14 

THE FIX 

KNOW IT ALL BY MILKOS; FIELD NOTES BY TOMAS VAN HOUTRYVE/VII/REDUX; CULTURE FEATURES BY JERRY RILEY 

06 LETTER FROM 

THE EDITOR 

The 

Counterrevolution 

07 THE 

CONVERSATION 

09 SINCE WE 

LAST SPOKE 

11 THE SMALL STUFF 

14 KNOW IT ALL 

‘Superfoods’ Are 

Never Super 

FIELD NOTES 

16 JHARIA, INDIA 

17 MARCH OF THE 

REFUGEES 

18 FREEDOM SQUARE 

19 GOSEONG, SOUTH 

KOREA 

20 LIRA, UGANDA 

20 DELICATE ARCH 

ON THE COVER 

Illustration by Jenue 

60 

19 

22 LEADING THE 

WAY IN WILDLIFE 

RESTORATION 

Native American 

nations like the 

Colville confederacy 

are flexing their 

treaty rights by 

reintroducing key 

species to the 

landscape. 

25 AMERICA’S 

FAVORITE GUN 

RESEARCHER 

John Lott is a oneman 

pro-gun 

research machine. 

The problem? Many 

of his peers have 

major misgivings 

about his methods. 

THE CULTURE PAGES 

60 CULTURE FEATURES 

A Library as Large as 

Africa 

62 PACIFIC 

STANDARD PICKS 

Twitter and Tear Gas 

63 SCENES 

The Refugees’ 

Theater 

64 SCENES 

Standing Up for 

Transgender 

Acceptance 

65 GUEST 

PROGRAMMER 

Anita Kunz 

66 SHELF HELP 

The Boy Who Loved 

Too Much 

66 BOOK REVIEW 

Divided by Design 

67 SHELF HELP 

Islamophobia and 

Racism in America 

68 ONE LAST THING 

Party Plates 


Ahead of a special photo 

issue coming in July, Pacific 

Standard was honored with 

the National Magazine 

Award for Feature 

Photography in February. 

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR 

The Counterrevolution 

Our current president was elected to office on the promise that he would 

bring jobs back to America—that he alone could grow the economy in ways 

previously unseen. Donald Trump’s economic plan calls for creating 25 

million new jobs over the next decade. That’s a vision we can all get behind—and 

many did back in November—but can he pull it off? Can anyone? 

In the early 1970s, a group of environmental scientists at the Massachusetts 

Institute of Technology used a giant mainframe computer to generate several 

future scenarios for population and economic growth around the world given 

existing resources. Their report, The Limits to Growth, was a clarion call for 

humanity to recognize the inevitable limits imposed by a finite planet. Nevertheless, 

in the 40-plus years since it was published, politicians have clung 

to an ideology that has been illogical from the start: that endless economic 

growth is not only possible but is the highest achievement for human society. 

In this issue, Christopher Ketcham looks back at the legacy of The Limits 

to Growth and considers why we still believe the myth. That essay anchors a 

series of feature stories built around the theme of revolutionary ideas—an 

expansion of our annual 30 under 30 franchise, which is packed with bright 

young minds with some big ideas of their own. This year’s selection includes 

a physics prodigy and autism advocate; a behavioral economist at Facebook; 

several innovative advocates for veterans; and a handful of inventors. 

The architect of our list since its inception, Avital Andrews, says that she’s 

often asked if narrowing down the field of candidates we receive each year is 

a depressing task. “They mean, I think, that it must be disheartening to focus 

on people who have accomplished so much so young, while we common older 

folk (I am, let’s say, past 30) live our commoner, older lives,” she explains. 

But, in fact, she feels the opposite. “It’s inspiring,” Andrews 

writes in the introduction to our 12-page package, which this 

year also includes a series of miniature profiles of inspiring folks 

on the other end of the age spectrum (Trump didn’t make the 

cut). “It gives me faith for the future. Rather than be intimidated 

by the 30 up-and-comers on Pacific Standard’s 2017 list, we 

should take their existence as 

a needed sign that everything 

might, after all, turn out OK.” 

In an age when political 

logic has seemingly vanished, 

I find this reminder 

more vital than ever. 

Nichola ackson 

Editor-in-Chief 

Seven 

Things You 

Would Have 

Learned If 

You Read 

PSmag.com 

1 

Congress has 

disciplined 20 

lawmakers since 

the Office of 

Congressional 

Ethics’ inception 

in 2008. 

2 

Marijuana 

growers account 

for 1 percent of 

electricity use 

in the United 

States. 

3 

More than 70 

rural American 

hospitals 

have closed in 

the past six 

years. 

4 

There are just 

eight fulltime 

librarians 

working in the 

School District 

of Philadelphia. 

5 

There is a 

correlation 

between an 

NFL player’s 

penalties and his 

arrest record. 

6 

Autism was 

first described 

in the 1940s by 

an Austrian- 

American 

psychiatrist. 

7 

One hundred 

and eighty-five 

environmental 

activists were 

murdered in 

2015 alone. 

6 MAY/JUNE 2017 • PSMAG.COM

PRIMER 

THE CONVERSATION 

TALK TO US LETTERS@PSMAG.COM 

Racism in the 

Diamond Mine 

(JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2017) 

Although the author, Will 

McGrath, does not mention 

Letšeng Diamond Mine 

by name, the description 

clearly refers to the Letšeng 

Diamond Mine. It is therefore 

important to state 

unequivocally that racism 

of any kind has never been, 

and will never be, tolerated 

at the Letšeng mine. 

The management of 

Letšeng Diamond Mine is 

committed to transparency 

in all aspects of its operations, 

and regularly hosts 

journalists at the mine. It 

is therefore disappointing 

that McGrath did not make 

contact with the company, 

and therefore afford the 

Letšeng mine the opportunity 

to emphasize that racism 

has no place at Letšeng. 

As a locally registered 

business entity, the company 

is subject to the laws 

of Lesotho, including the 

Constitution, which, under 

Section 18, unequivocally 

guarantees freedom from 

discrimination based on 

race. This is at the core of 

the company’s policies. 

The company’s policies, 

regulations, and programs 

further reflect its policy of 

zero tolerance of racism, 

where all employees are 

treated equally irrespective 

of diversity of thoughts, 

ideas, beliefs, race, color, sex, 

language, national origin, 

religion, orientation, or age. 

All employees’ concerns are 

heard and necessary actions 

are taken, with regular feedback 

given to employees. 

—LETŠENG DIAMONDS 

MANAGEMENT 

On the Milo Bus 

With the Lost Boys of 

America’s New Right 

(PSMAG.COM, FEBRUARY 21) 

[Milo] Yiannopoulos wasn’t 

just talking about “consenting 

relationships between 

adult men where there’s a 

large age gap.” Yiannopoulos 

was talking about relationships 

between young men— 

teenage boys above the age 

of consent—and older adult 

gay men. But he also said 

this: “We’re talking about 

13-25, 13-28—these things 

do happen perfectly consensually.” 

Challenged on 

another point, Yiannopoulos 

described 13-year-olds 

as “sexually mature” (has 

he ever met a 13-year-old?) 

Our Favorite 

Tweet 

@jk_rowling: 

This is so beautiful, 

it made me cry. 

@Lollardfish: On 

Down syndrome 

& stories: “’Twas 

the night before 

the night before 

Christmas, and 

Harry Potter was 

in trouble.” [“Down 

Syndrome and the 

Stories We Tell,” 

PSmag.com] 

••• 

PS Sighting 

This is the second 

National Magazine 

Award for Pacific 

Standard. 

••• 

Update 

Our story “A New 

Normal” (March/ 

April 2017) stated 

that the psychiatrist 

Darin Dougherty, 

the neurosurgeon 

Emad Eskandar, and 

the neuroengineer 

Alik Widge designed 

and surgically 

implanted Liss 

Murphy’s deep-brain 

stimulation device. 

Only Dougherty 

and Eskandar 

participated, and 

while they designed 

Murphy’s clinical trial, 

they did not design 

the device itself. We 

regret the error. 

and clearly suggested that 

13-year-olds were capable of 

consenting to sexual contact 

with adults. And, of course, 

Yiannopoulos crudely/jokingly 

expressed his gratitude 

to the priest he says molested 

him when he was 14. 

But I gotta say ... many gay 

men had relationships when 

they were first coming out 

with older gay men. These 

relationships can be “a real 

and meaningful part of [early] 

romantic experience,” 

per [author Laurie] Penny, 

“[and they] can help a young 

gay man escape from a lack 

of support or understanding 

at home,” per Yiannopoulos. 

(They can also be abusive or 

exploitative nightmares— 

but so too can early romantic 

relationships with “ageappropriate” 

partners. High 

school sweethearts can also 

be abusers.) 

So look, straight people, 

if you don’t want gay 

teenagers above the age 

of consent entering into 

sexual relationships [with] 

older gay men—if you don’t 

want your gay sons pursuing 

older gay men and viceversa—do 

what you can 

to make it safe for your 

gay teenagers to come out 

and date each other. Be 

just as supportive, proud, 

affirming, and meddlesome 

when your gay teen starts to 

date as you are when your 

straight teens start to date. 

—DAN SAVAGE 

On the one hand: This 

doesn’t make them look 

good. On the other hand: 

This is yet another in a long 

line of articles that depict 

Milo and his followers as 

pitiable and sad and deserving 

of empathy while spending 

no time to focus on the 

real human damage they 

have done over the years. 

—NOTMYBESTPLAN 

ILLUSTRATION BY JUNGYEON ROH 


PRIMER 

SINCE WE LAST SPOKE 

NEW TWISTS ON PAST STORIES 

PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY TAYLOR LE 

Streaming for Justice 

In a 2016 interview with Kathleen Sharp, the 

director Ava DuVernay argued that, “if some 

people are rendered as caricatures or as less 

than human [in film], that … impacts policy 

and politics, culture.” In late January the Academy 

Awards recognized the Selma director’s 

ability to leave a more positive impression on 

culture, announcing that her latest movie, the 

criminal justice documentary 13th, was one of 

five films nominated for best documentary. In 

a recent interview with Oprah Winfrey, DuVernay 

emphasized the film’s rare success—she 

says it’s her most widely distributed—as 

a result of its availability 

for streaming on Netflix, a 

crucial equalizer for diverse 

filmmakers: “For this film 

to be so widely available in 

190 countries, I didn’t understand 

what the power of 

that would be. My Twitter 

timeline is in shambles.” 

Second Wind 

There are few places on 

Earth as windy as the billionaire 

Philip Anschutz’s 

ranch in Wyoming. That’s 

why, Gabriel Kahn reported 

in Pacific Standard in 2015, 

the magnate decided years 

ago to build a wind farm on 

site, along with an interstate 

power line to carry its bounty 

to California—where laws 

mandate that a third of the 

state’s electricity must come 

from renewable sources by 

2020. Kahn chronicled the 

regulatory quagmire that 

has kept the project in the 

planning stages, from conservation 

rules for native 

species to the construction 

of the power line itself. “One 

of the last power lines of this 

magnitude to be built in the 

United States,” Kahn wrote, 

“the Pacific Intertie, from 

Oregon to Southern California 

(completed in 1970), 

required a presidential decree.” 

In December, though, 

Secretary of the Interior 

Sally Jewell announced the 

approval of an Anschutz-financed 

green-energy power 

line that will stretch more 

than 700 miles. For Anschutz’s 

Power Company of 

Wyoming—which will send 

3,000 megawatts through 

the line from his Wyoming 

ranch—the approval is a 

long time coming. 

Bailed Out 

In 2015, Maura Ewing wrote 

about the Bronx Freedom 

Fund, a charitable bond fund 

that helps low-income people 

make bail. The bail fund 

model has been replicated 

in Massachusetts, Connecticut, 

Brooklyn, and Nashville, 

and funds targeting specific 

groups have cropped up 

elsewhere. (In Baltimore, 

for example, one group posts 

bail for those arrested while 

protesting violence.) Some 

legal observers think the 

rise of community groups 

using donations to post bail 

for strangers who can’t do so 

themselves has the potential 

to upend the criminal justice 

system, but the State of New 

Jersey has decided to take 

matters into its own hands: 

In January, a near-complete 

elimination of the cash bail 

system went into effect 

thanks to a constitutional 

amendment approved by 

voters in 2014. Judges still 

have the power to impose 

bail, though the New York 

Times reported that judges 

set bail just three times in 

the 3,382 cases statewide 

that were processed in the 

first four weeks after the 

amendment took effect. 


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PRIMER 

THE SMALL STUFF 

NEWS & NOTES ON HUMAN BEHAVIOR 

THERE’S A NAME FOR THAT 

INVISIBILITYCLOAKILLUSION 

WE ALL KNOW what it’s like to feel we’re being watched. Teenagers are particularly 

familiar with the discomfiting sense that everyone around them is scrutinizing 

their risky new haircuts, cool new shoes, or grease-stained T-shirts. Bad news, 

youth of the world: According to a recent series of studies, we’re being watched 

even more than we think. 

Researchers from Yale University surveyed students exiting a dining hall. Respondents 

reliably felt that they’d observed their fellow diners (strangers and 

friends alike) more than their fellow diners had observed them. Of course, it’s a 

mathematical impossibility that every student was more socially observant than 

average. But that’s how most of them felt. Students in another dining-room survey 

were more likely to interpret instances of eye contact as moments when they’d 

been caught looking—not when they’d caught someone else doing the same. And, 

in a related study, students fell wildly short in estimating how much another student 

had observed about them in a waiting-room interaction. 

The study’s authors took these results as evidence of an “invisibility cloak illusion.” 

Stuck inside our heads, we all know how much we’re watching others, but fail to grasp 

just how much everyone else is watching us—in part, the researchers speculated, because 

this ignorance makes us feel secure. “To the extent knowledge is power,” they 

wrote, “we should feel more powerful if we believe we are observing others more, and 

so have more knowledge of them, than they do of us.” We often conceal our information-gathering 

by averting our gazes when caught. After all, no one wants to be the 

nosy gawker at a party. It turns out, though, that most of us probably are. 

—PETER C. BAKER 

ILLUSTRATION BY MATT CHASE 

QUICK STUDY 

A Virtual 

Escape 

From 

Chronic Pain 

If you suffer from chronic 

pain, you’ve probably 

wished you could enter an 

alternate universe. Now, 

thanks to virtual-reality 

technology, you can, at least 

temporarily—and the result 

is an enormous reduction 

in physical suffering. That’s 

the finding of a study published 

in the online journal 

PLoS One that featured 30 

participants with various 

medical conditions causing 

chronic pain, most involving 

the spine or hips. Using 

an Oculus Rift headset, all 

spent five minutes exploring 

a 360-degree fantasy landscape 

with “trees, hills, snow 

scenes, caves, flames and 

otters.” On average, their 

pain level dropped by 60 

percent while in this virtual 

world. When they returned 

to the real world, it was still 

down by 33 percent—a reduction 

roughly equivalent 

to a dose of morphine. While 

it’s not clear how long this 

effect lasts, the team argues 

a combination of pleasant 

distraction and, perhaps, the 

release of endorphins makes 

virtual reality a promising, 

drug-free way to alleviate 

pain that just won’t quit. 

—TOM JACOBS 


PRIMER 

THE SMALL STUFF 

NEWS & NOTES ON HUMAN BEHAVIOR 

RESEARCH GONE WILD 

POWER 

POSEUR 

•What the Media Says 

In December, Elite Daily 

touted “seven ways 

power poses can improve 

your health and your 

work life,” citing a 2012 

TED Talk given by the 

Harvard University social 

psychologist Amy Cuddy. 

The article reached 

millions of readers online; 

Good magazine followed 

—STEVE PASIERB, president of the Toy Industry Association, in his year-end 

letter to members about an import-tax code change proposed in the House of 

Representatives. More than 96 percent of American toy spending went to imports for 

the past seven years, IBISWorld estimates. Roughly 95 percent of Hasbro products 

and 100 percent of Mattel’s are made overseas, according to a toy-industry analysis 

by Wells Fargo. The original 1959 Barbie doll was stamped “Made in Japan.” 

ILLUSTRATION BY MATT CHASE 

up in January with a 

breathless post about 

Cuddy’s “secret to selfconfidence.” 

This is just 

the latest exposure for 

power posing, which has 

garnered attention from 

outlets like the New York 

Times and the Washington 

Post, as well as television 

shows like Brooklyn 99. 

•What the Research 

Found 

Cuddy based her talk 

on studies of mock 

interviews. In one 

example, 66 Columbia 

University students were 

told to maintain either 

“high-power” (expansive, 

open)—à la Wonder 

Wom 

man—or “low-power” 

(hunched over, closed) 

postures for several 

minutes while preparing 

aspeech about their 

qualifiications for their 

dream 

jobs, which they 

then presented to two 

hiring 

professionals. As 

Cuddy and her team 

predicted, participants 

who struck high-power 

posess “performed better 

and were more likely 

to 

be chosen for hire.” 

•What the Media Missed 

In 2015, a team led by 

University of Zurich 

researcher Eva Ranehill 

attempted to replicate 

Cuddy’s study with 

a greater number of 

participants. They found 

that, while test subjects 

said they felt more 

powerful after posing, 

there were no significant 

changes in their behavior. 

A year later, University of 

Pennsylvania researchers 

studied the effects of 

power posing after a 

tug-of-war competition. 

Among both winners and 

losers, high-power poses 

had little to no effect on 

feelings of power, raising 

doubts about Cuddy’s 

notion that posture 

can help you “fake it till 

you become it.” One of 

Cuddy’s co-authors even 

posted on her faculty 

page: “I do not believe 

that ‘power pose’ effects 

are real.” Throughout it all, 

Cuddy has stood behind 

her research. So, strike 

poses if you like—but 

know the jury is still out 

on their tangible effects. 

—SARAH WITMAN 

OVERHEARD 

NO ONE WANTS 

TO HAVE TO 

EXPLAIN TO THEIR 

CHILDREN WHY 

SANTA WAS PUT 

OUT OF WORK.” 

QUICK STUDY 

Young Man, 

You Just 

Earned Yourself 

a Good 

Euphemism! 

Few parents would admit 

to beating their children. 

But what about spanking 

them? A study published 

in the journal Psychology 

of Violence finds parents 

were more comfortable 

with corporal punishment 

when gentler language was 

used to describe it. In an 

online survey, 672 adults 

were presented with a few 

brief vignettes about a 

mother paddling her fiveyear-old 

son, and asked 

how common, acceptable, 

and effective her action 

was. She scored highest on 

all three measures when 

her action was described as 

spanking and lowest when 

it was described as beating, 

with “swatting,” “hitting,” 

and “slapping” in between. 

Whatever you call it, research 

is clear that corporal 

punishment is both ineffective 

and psychologically 

harmful to children; the research 

team that authored 

the paper suggests “excising 

the term spank from 

our lexicon and replacing 

it with the word assault” 

could help change attitudes 

and behavior. Euphemisms 

can hurt—literally. 

—TOM JACOBS 


PRIMER 

KNOW IT ALL 

‘Superfoods’ 

Aren’t That Super 

So why do we keep falling for them? 

BY MICHAEL FITZGERALD 

AMERICANS FALL hard for so-called superfoods. Sales keep 

skyrocketing for nutrient-dense fruits and vegetables like acai, 

pomegranate, beets, and goji berries. But most experts agree that 

the superfoods hype is more a result of marketing quackery than of 

healthy outcomes. Food isn’t medicine, and consumers shouldn’t 

expect any single food to cure what ails them—especially not 

the chronic ailments that many superfoods are purported to 

address. Three-quarters of Americans still won’t adopt 

the calorie-modest, balanced diet doctors have long 

recommended. Instead, we’re overinvesting billions 

on the food cure-all du jour. What 

keeps us reaching for the quick fix? 

PHOTOS BY ANDREY ANDREEV & MILKOS 


A COMPLETE GUIDE TO THE MOST IMPORTANT STORIES 

NATIONAL GOVERNMENTS 

HAVE SKIN IN THE GAME 

THE SCIENCE IS CONFUSING 

Countless diet books and 

headlines champion particular 

nutrients’ abilities to address 

specific health concerns. Coffee, 

dark chocolate, red wine—every 

day we hear about their high 

levels of vitamins that prevent 

cell damage. It’s true that, in 

recent years, nutrition science 

has become sophisticated 

enough to begin exploring how 

singular molecular components 

in food affect the body. But 

this research has not yet 

come close to fully capturing 

the relationship between 

diet, anatomy, lifestyle, and 

health outcomes. Take your 

antioxidant-stuffed produce 

drawer: A 2013 summary of 

decades of research from the 

National Institutes of Health 

found that, while “people 

who eat more vegetables 

and fruits have lower risks of 

several diseases … it is not 

clear whether these results 

are related to the amounts of 

antioxidants in vegetables and 

fruits … or to other lifestyle 

choices.” Around the same time, 

the Department of Agriculture 

closed down a database the 

organization had been using 

to promote high-antioxidant 

foods for years. Of course, 

that hasn’t stopped huckster 

dieticians, food marketers, 

and credulous journalists from 

spreading breathless claims on 

superfoods’ behalf. 

In the 1990s, Japan had a 

rice problem. Consumption 

of the grain, one of the 

country’s staple crops, was 

on the decline. In response, 

one rice-producing region 

near Tokyo tried a rebranding, 

investing in research on 

the health benefits of what 

they hoped would be more 

marketable: big-germ brown 

rice. Researchers found in biggerm 

high levels of the amino 

acid GABA, which purportedly 

accelerates brain metabolism, 

decreasing depression and 

headaches. In 2004, Japan 

presented these results to the 

United Nations, inspiring other 

countries, including South 

Korea, to make their own major 

investments in researching, 

growing, and marketing the 

“miracle rice.” Though the 

GABA claims don’t carry 

more weight than those about 

antioxidants, rice consumption 

soon ceased to decline in 

Japan, and diet gurus the 

world over now promote biggerm. 

Similar government-led 

development efforts involving 

loans, grants, and advertising 

have played a role in the rise 

of acai, pomegranate, and 

other homegrown superfood 

industries worldwide. 

MEANWHILE, THE FOOD 

POLICE ARE HANDCUFFED 

Food companies in the United 

States have always faced a 

major obstacle: full stomachs. 

The American population is 

only growing around 1 percent 

per year, while our physical 

capacity to consume food tops 

out at around 1,500 pounds 

of food per year. Yet our food 

supply provides nearly 4,000 

calories per day per capita, 

roughly twice the need of most 

people. How did the industry 

convince people to buy more 

than they needed? In her 

landmark 2003 book Food 

Politics: How the Food Industry 

Influences Nutrition & Health, 

the New York University 

nutritionist Marion Nestle 

meticulously documented 

how the food industry spent 

decades lobbying government 

agencies to loosen marketing 

laws. Legislation in the early 

1990s opened the doors for 

the overly optimistic nutritional 

claims that make food and 

supplements sound like 

medicine to consumers who 

are concerned about higher 

rates of chronic disease (and 

who have decreasing trust in 

the pharmaceutical industry). 

AND WE’RE SUCKERS FOR 

MISLEADING HEALTH CLAIMS 

IN FOOD ADVERTISEMENTS 

We are a society obsessed 

with the potential harmful 

effects of eating, according to 

the University of Pennsylvania 

psychologist Paul Rozin, 

renowned for his theories 

on the role that fear and 

disgust play in modern food 

culture. Overwhelmed by the 

abundance and variety of 

foods in our groceries, and 

flooded with competing health 

claims, we can’t help but make 

instinctive food-purchase 

decisions, subject to the whims 

of the latest trends and health 

scares. No wonder that, when 

confronted with ambiguities 

in health-based marketing 

claims, we fill in the gaps 

with inaccurate inferences, as 

one 2013 study found. Labels 

bragging about supposed 

health benefits, such as low 

fat content, create what the 

study described as a “halo,” a 

vague but positive glow that 

temporarily relieves our foodcentered 

anxieties—at least 

long enough to get through 

checkout. 

•MICHAEL FITZGERALD is a 

Pacific Standard senior editor. 

@MCHLFTZGRLD 


FIELD 

NOTES 

DISPATCHES 

FROM 

UNFAMILIAR 

TERRITORY 

JHARIA, INDIA 

An underground fire, which locals say first started 

in an abandoned mine here in 1916, still burns as 

workers tap the remaining supply of coal. 

PHOTO BY JOHNNY HAGLUND 


March of the 

Refugees 

In Hegyeshalom, one of 

the last Hungarian villages 

before the Austrian border, 

clothes cover the ground. 

They rest in piles on the 

side of the road and hang 

off shrubs and trees. There 

are abandoned baby carriages, 

fully packed duffel 

bags, and pieces of plastic 

litter strewn about all the 

way to the horizon. 

It is September of 2015, 

and, every half hour or so, 

hundreds of refugees and 

migrants march from the 

village train station toward 

Austria. The first time my 

traveling companion and 

I pull our car alongside 

them with supplies, we are 

mobbed. “Water, water, 

water!” they shout, fighting 

to reach into the back 

seat. Within a minute and 

a half, the car is emptied of 

everything we’ve brought, 

and the column—order restored—moves 

on. A small 

girl, maybe six, asks me if 

there’s more water. I give 

her a stuffed rabbit, which 

seemed less absurd when I 

decided to buy it. 

When we return to the 

site with more water, we 

find other volunteers by 

the side of the road. Anna, 

a pink-cheeked 15-yearold 

Austrian, cries as she 

describes how, at certain 

points, the police have not 

allowed them to provide 

assistance. To deal with 

her anger, she tells me, she 

wrote a poem about how 

“they are not letting us be 

human, because it is human 

to help people.” 

We unload our water, 

and Anna and the other 

volunteers explain the 

rules. The police will not 

interfere, Anna says, as 

long as the people do not 

stop moving. We stagger 

the piles of water bottles 

to prevent bottlenecks 

and hand them off without 

making anyone break 

stride. Half-liter bottles are 

best: People are too tired, 

their hands too full, to 

carry anything bigger. Even 

the small bottles we hand 

them are abandoned 50 

yards down the road, still 

half-full. Children’s shoes 

are also frequently discarded, 

so parents may hoist 

their youngsters without 

the extra weight. 

An old woman sits down 

in the dirt, gestures to her 

feet, and begins to cry. I ask 

the police if they will drive 

her to the border. They will 

not, but they won’t prevent 

us from doing it. 

I pat my chest and pretend 

to hold a steering 

wheel, trying to communicate 

a sense of safety and assurance, 

which is ridiculous 

given the circumstances of 

our meeting. Another woman 

makes a motion with her 

thumb—I think she’s asking 

if they’ll be processed at the 

border. I have no idea. Like 

many of the volunteers, I’m 

wearing a fluorescent vest 

that is meant to signify authority 

but really signifies 

nothing. I got it from under 

the seat of the rental car 

we’re sleeping in. We take 

the old woman and her family 

to the border one carload 

atatime. 

We do our best to drive 

all those who are too young, 

old, injured, or despondent 

to keep walking. While we 

see every conceivable demographic, 

the most common 

is young, male, and 

middle class—the most able 

to afford the smuggler’s 

fees. They tell us how their 

parents or grandparents 

chose to stay behind in Syria, 

Iraq, or Afghanistan, or 

how they were kidnapped 

and mugged by their smugglers, 

or how they have lost, 

or lost track of, friends and 

family along the way. We 

see an injured man being 

carried by four others, and 

another man traveling with 

his cat. Some have been 

trying to reach Europe for 

weeks; others have been at 

it for a year. 

“Just two kilometers,” I 

tell a man, as I hand him his 

water bottle. “And what is 

there?” he asks warily. Austria, 

I say. He is ecstatic. 

People do not know 

where they are, or even what 

country they’re in. An endless 

series of buses or trains 

dumps them in strange 

places, and when they get off 

and resume walking, they’re 

not told where or how far 

they have to go. 

After hours of people 

trickling past us 20 or 30 at 

a time, a larger police presence 

materializes around 

nightfall. The largest column 

we’ve seen marches 

toward us, and we realize 

what it is: the last trainload 

before authorities 

close Hungary’s southern 

border. We linger there 

purposelessly for a few 

minutes in the dark. 

When we finally get in 

the car, Hegyeshalom is 

silent. The only people left 

are the ones who live there, 

quietly preparing for bed 

inside their homes. 

—KASTALIA MEDRANO 


FIELD NOTES 

Freedom 

Square 

One morning last September, 

Gary Brown unzipped 

the front flap of the tent he 

had been living in for three 

weeks and stepped into the 

heat of the day. 

Holding a hand above 

his eyes to block the sun, 

he surveyed the scene in 

front of him—a dusty lot in 

Chicago’s North Lawndale 

neighborhood—looking to 

see what had changed since 

the night before. Not much: 

Two other sleeper tents 

were still there next to his 

on the lot’s grassy south 

edge. The improvised, tarproofed 

kitchen was still 

standing. So was a small 

library tent overflowing 

with donated books and a 

“store” tent crammed with 

free clothes and toiletries. 

People were setting out tables 

and covering them with 

back-to-school supplies: 

backpacks, notebooks, pens, 

and pencils. A few neighborhood 

children were 

cautiously browsing. Others 

were getting their faces 

painted at a crafts station. 

“Well, OK,” Brown said, 

nodding. At 46, the combination 

of his speaking 

style (slow and careful) and 

glasses (rectangular, blackframed) 

gives him a faintly 

professorial air. “I guess 

we’re still here.” 

Leading me around the 

lot, he recalled the evening 

he and his fiancée, Rebecca 

Thomas, moved in. Out 

for an evening stroll, the 

couple spotted the bustling 

encampment and stopped 

by, curious to see what the 

campers were up to. The 

people he met explained 

that they were activists, 

using the vacant lot to embody 

the spirit of a better 

North Lawndale—a place of 

mutual aid and celebratory 

pride instead of deprivation 

and police control. 

They were calling it Freedom 

Square, and they’d 

already been there for 

more than two weeks, sharing 

stories, serving meals, 

and talking through the 

forces—internal and external—that 

warped justice in 

the predominantly black 

and economically impoverished 

neighborhood. 

“We’ve lived here our 

entire lives, and we never 

saw anything like it,” Brown 

said. “Especially right here.” 

He pointed across the 

street at a warehouse-like 

brick structure, its parking 

lot surrounded by a 

fence topped with rows 

of barbed wire. Eighteen 

months earlier, the Guardian 

had begun publishing 

an investigative series 

about the building, widely 

referred to as Homan 

Square, that appeared to 

confirm many Chicagoans’ 

worst fears about their police 

department. Officially, 

it is an evidence-storage 

facility. But police records 

obtained by the newspaper 

revealed that officers 

were taking suspects there 

to detain and interrogate 

them without charging 

them or providing access 

to lawyers (in many cases, 

charges were filed later). 

In some cases, according 

to former detainees, these 

interrogations involved 

physical abuse. The department 

denied wrongdoing 

and later fought civil-rights 

litigation over its practices 

at the facility. 

“I was never tortured,” 

said Brown, who remembered 

being held in Homan 

Square three times. “But 

I was treated unfairly, 

denied my rights. And, 

over the years, have I met 

people who were tortured, 

or abused, or whatever you 

want to call it? Of course. 

Probably most people in 

North Lawndale have.” 

Brown and Thomas liked 

what they heard that first 

night. By the next morning, 

they’d returned and set up a 

tent. It wasn’t just the message. 

It was also the encampment 

itself—the sense 

of community, the pleasure 

of publicly demanding more 

from the world while simultaneously 

taking responsibility 

for a small piece of it. 

Plus, the couple was looking 

for a place to live. Through 

the summer, they’d been 

staying with members of 

Brown’s extended family 

while he looked for work, 

but the situation had become 

crowded and tense. 

Their tent was an upgrade, 

at least in terms of privacy. 

“It felt good,” Brown 

said. “Not easy, but good.” 

His favorite memories 

might have been the nights 

when neighborhood children 

would gather in the 

lot to watch movies projected 

from someone’s laptop 

onto a white sheet—the 

electricity and extension 

cords supplied by sympa- 


DISPATCHES FROM UNFAMILIAR TERRITORY 

thetic neighbors. Or maybe 

the best moments were the 

emotional visits from people 

who had been held and 

beaten at Homan Square. 

He couldn’t decide. 

Early on, some campers 

had settled on a practical 

demand: They would camp 

until a “Blue Lives Matter” 

ordinance proposed 

by a Chicago alderman was 

withdrawn or defeated. 

(It would have expanded 

Chicago’s hate-crime laws 

to cover police officers, 

firefighters, and emergency 

medical personnel.) But 

it was clear, from what 

Brown and everyone else 

told me, that the demand 

meant less to them than 

the atmosphere of possibility 

at the camp. People 

from across the city and 

beyond stopped by at all 

hours with donations and 

messages of support. And 

when police walking to 

work from a nearby parking 

lot stared at the campers, 

the campers stared 

back, or reveled in ignoring 

them. “We’re here to imagine 

a world without police, 

and to help everyone else 

imagine it too,” the playwright 

Kristiana Rae Colón 

said. She tipped her head 

in the direction of Homan 

Square. “Even them.” 

Brown didn’t quite agree; 

ultimately, he thought, society 

needed police. But he 

still liked being there. 

On the day Brown and 

I met—day 45 of Freedom 

Square—the project’s future 

was uncertain. The 

encampment had been 

started spontaneously, with 

no advance planning, by a 

small collective of young 

Chicago artist-activists 

called #LetUsBreathe 

(Colón is a founding member). 

For weeks, the group’s 

members had been slipping 

closer to exhaustion as they 

battled nights of torrential 

GOSEONG, SOUTH KOREA 

A South Korean soldier looks over the DMZ from 

a guard position on top of Observation Post 717, 

on the edge of the North Korean border. 

PHOTO BY TOMAS VAN HOUTRYVE/VII/REDUX 

rain, tried to mediate infighting 

without betraying 

deeply held ideals about 

justice and control, and did 

their best to provide a modicum 

of round-the-clock security. 

On day 41, they had 

posted an announcement 

online, explaining that they 

could no longer assume responsibility 

for the project 

they’d started. 

When I returned to the 

square the following week, 

Brown and Thomas were 

the only people there. Activists 

were still dropping 

off supplies, they said. And 

the kitchen, library, and 

store were still standing. 

But without daily upkeep, 

they were slouching into 

ruin. “Kids come by and 

knock stuff over, take stuff,” 

Brown said. “It’s sad.” 

Looking for lunch, we got 

in my car. Between driving 

instructions, Brown and 

Thomas pointed out personal 

landmarks (churches 

they’d attended, schools 

where they’d grown up) or, 

in some cases, vacant lots 

where landmarks used to 

be. In a few, grass was growing 

up through the cracks 

in the pavement, stretching 

five or even six feet tall. 

When I stopped by the 

lot again the following 

week, Brown and Thomas’ 

tent was gone. When I 

called Brown, he told me 

that life in the tent had 

become too difficult. Now 

they were living in an unfinished 

home that he was 

helping renovate. They 

had a few weeks to find another 

place to stay. “When 

we moved in, it was about 

feeling free together, as a 

community,” Brown said. “I 

liked that feeling. I’d like to 

feel it again, I really would. 

And I’d like it to last.” 



FIELD NOTES 

LIRA, UGANDA 

Prisoners, many of whom claim to be juveniles, 

line up for dinner at Lira Prison. Poor birth records 

make it difficult for Ugandan prison officials to 

remove younger prisoners from adult facilities. 

PHOTO BY LYNSEY ADDARIO 

Delicate 

Arch 

The trail starts out wide, 

flat, and graveled. Soon, 

though, the easy going ends, 

and the route takes hikers 

up and over a broad, smooth 

rock face, marked occasion- 

ally by small cairns. From 

the top of the bald slickrock 

dome, the trail twists and 

turns through a maze of 

rock and sand. Finally, it 

runs up along a narrow rock 

ledge and into a vast natural 

amphitheater. Visitors 

climb through a window in 

the rock and arrive in the 

amphitheater’s nosebleed 

section. Golden rock curves 

away on both sides, tapering 

to create a stage at the 

lower end. The tall, steeply 

curved rock of Delicate 

Arch is the star at its center. 

When I arrive at 7:16 p.m. 

on an April evening, I count 

49 people ahead of me— 

and as I take in the scene, 

more hikers climb into the 

amphitheater behind me. 

It’s taken me 30 minutes 

to cover the 1.5 miles from 

the parking lot: a moderate 

hike, but just challeng- 


DISPATCHES FROM UNFAMILIAR TERRITORY 

ing enough to exclude the 

many national-park visitors 

who never stray more 

than a few hundred feet 

from their cars. Still, more 

people keep arriving. I 

count seven high-end DSLR 

cameras mounted on tripods 

and two smartphones 

riding on selfie sticks. Some 

people have brought picnic 

blankets, cans of beer, and 

bottles of wine. One cluster, 

announcing themselves as 

Wisconsinites, has brought 

cheese curds. “That’s how 

we roll,” one of them says to 

a neighboring group. 

“Guys, this is the golden 

hour,” someone else says. 

And it is. A rich, warm glow 

fills the amphitheater and 

lights up the arch below us. 

The effect is something like 

looking through a glass jar 

of honey held up to the sun. 

Delicate Arch is the most 

famous rock formation in 

Arches National Park—and, 

almost certainly, in the entire 

state of Utah. It’s been 

frequented by travelers for 

over a century—decades 

before some of the park’s 

other arches were officially 

identified. And it’s been 

called by a few names over 

the years: Cowboy’s Chaps, 

Old Maid’s Bloomers. But 

the more dignified moniker 

stuck. In 1996, an image of 

the arch landed on Utah’s 

license plate, to commemorate 

the centennial 

of statehood. 

As Delicate Arch has become 

more prominent, so 

too has Arches itself. The 

park saw just over 16,000 

visitors in 1950, when it 

was still just a national 

monument. In 2015, that 

number had climbed to 

nearly 1.4 million. For 

thousands of people each 

year, watching the sun rise 

or set over Delicate Arch 

is an Arches must-do. The 

crowd I’ve joined is, if anything, 

smaller than usual. 

As the honey-colored 

light intensifies to its peak, 

and the long shadow of the 

amphitheater’s upper wall 

creeps toward the arch, 

the more serious photographers 

scramble eagerly 

from one spot to another, 

clicking away. Others are 

happy to sit back and take 

in the show. A younger, 

bearded guy ambles by, 

shirt unbuttoned and beer 

in hand, and notices my 

notebook. “That’s a good 

idea,” he says. “I should 

have brought my journal.” 

A few minutes later, as a 

girl poses for a selfie down 

in front of the arch, he hollers, 

“That’s so sexy!” 

Delicate Arch at sunset 

should be my nightmare: I 

like my national parks empty 

and serene. But instead, 

I find myself smiling at the 

beer-drinking bros, at the 

selfie-takers, at the selfserious 

amateur photographers 

with their bazooka 

lenses and tripods. I think 

back to a moment from 

Michael Ondaatje’s novel 

In the Skin of a Lion. One of 

the characters is listening 

to an audience in a movie 

theater laugh together on 

cue, when he realizes that 

this shared laughter is, in 

its way, a conversation. 

We often seek out solitude 

in the wilderness, but humans 

are social animals at 

heart. And what’s happening 

here is a communal experience—a 

collective sharing of 

something beautiful. 

In Desert Solitaire, Edward 

Abbey wrote: “There 

are several ways of looking 

at Delicate Arch. Depending 

on your preconceptions 

you may see the eroded 

remnant of a sandstone fin, 

a giant engagement ring 

cemented in rock, a bowlegged 

pair of petrified cowboy 

chaps, a triumphal arch 

for a procession of angels, 

an illogical geologic freak, 

a happening—a something 

that happened and will never 

happen quite that way 

“Suit yourself. 

You may see a 

symbol, a 

sign, a fact, a 

thing without 

meaning or a 

meaning 

which includes 

all things. 

” 

again, a frame more significant 

than its picture, a simple 

monolith eaten away by 

weather and time and soon 

to disintegrate into a chaos 

of falling rock.... Suit yourself. 

You may see a symbol, 

a sign, a fact, a thing without 

meaning or a meaning 

which includes all things.” 

On this night, where I suppose 

some others might see 

a tourist trap, I see a gathering 

place. 

The light fades fast, and 

the cold desert night moves 

in. The audience leaves 

in a slow stream—when I 

pack up to go, there are still 

more than a dozen people 

scattered across the amphitheater, 

watching the last of 

the day’s color and warmth 

drain out of the rock. Halfway 

back to the car, I have 

to pull out my headlamp 

to see the gravel trail at my 

feet. I look back at the slickrock 

dome and see a cluster 

of headlamps bobbing down 

the rock together—fireflies 

in the Utah night. 

—EVA HOLLAND 


THE FIX 

• JIMMY TOBIAS is a Pacific Standard contributing writer and freelance journalist 

covering extinction, extraction, and environmental justice. @JAMESCTOBIAS 

SOLUTIONS, AND 

THE PEOPLE 

WORKING 

TOWARD THEM 

Leading the 

Way in Wildlife 

Restoration 

Across the country, 

Native American 

nations like the Colville 

confederacy are flexing 

their treaty rights by 

reintroducing key 

species to the landscape. 

BY JIMMY TOBIAS 

I AM ADMIRING a 

stuffed gray wolf 

and other taxidermy 

displays in 

the imposing new 

headquarters of the Confederated 

Tribes of the Colville Reservation 

in Washington state when Richard 

Whitney, an affable man with broad 

shoulders and a single black braid, 

finally arrives. He shakes my hand. 

He smiles. He’s a little late, he explains, 

because he was up all night 

smoking salmon for his daughter’s 

impending wedding in Seattle. 

Then he’s off again. He grabs 

telemetry equipment. He snags a 

spotting scope and some snacks. 

He leads me to a white Toyota 

pick-up parked in the sprawling 

lot, turns the key, hits the gas, and we’re on our way, zipping along the Columbia 

River and climbing high onto a basalt-studded plateau from which one can see 

the beginnings of the Cascade mountains many miles to the west. 

Whitney, a wildlife biologist and reservation resident, is spending the day with 

me as we travel tribal lands looking for a lovely and elusive animal that had, until 

recently, been absent from the landscape for a century or more. Like many other 

indigenous nations across the country, the Colville tribes are ardent defenders of 

nature and leaders in restoring native wildlife to their territory. Many tribal members 

see wildlife restoration as a direct expression of their self-determination and 

sovereignty. Helping pronghorn antelope return to Washington, an achievement 

more than a decade in the making, is their latest contribution to the cause. 

“The way we see it is, any native species that belongs here, that should have 

been here ... why not bring it [back]?” says Whitney, chatting away behind the 

22 MAY/JUNE 2017 • PSMAG.COM 

ILLUSTRATION BY MIKE MCQUADE

Back From the Brink 

THE COLVILLE CONFEDERACY IS NOT 

ALONE. IN THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST 

AND BEYOND, NUMEROUS OTHER TRIBES 

ARE LEADING THE WAY WHEN IT 

COMES TO WILDLIFE REINTRODUCTION. 

BY JIMMY TOBIAS 

SALMON 

The Columbia 

River Inter-Tribal 

Fish Commission, 

a joint project 

of the Yakama, 

Warm Springs, 

Umatilla, and Nez 

Perce tribes, is 

one of the most 

prominent salmonconservation 

organizations in 

the country. Since 

its inception in 

1977, it has used 

habitat restoration, 

fish reintroduction, 

and treaty-rights 

lawsuits to bring 

steelhead trout as 

well as Chinook 

and coho salmon 

back to waterways 

throughout the 

Columbia River 

system. 

PRONGHORN 

Like the 

confederated 

Colville tribes, the 

Yakama people 

have reintroduced 

pronghorn 

antelope onto 

their reservation in 

central Washington. 

The animals, 99 of 

which were released 

on tribal lands in 

2011, are thriving. 

BISON 

In northern 

Montana, bison 

have already been 

reintroduced on 

the Fort Peck and 

Fort Belknap Indian 

Reservations. 

And now the 

Blackfeet tribe has 

announced plans 

to launch a bison 

reintroduction 

program as 

well. The onceubiquitous 

ungulates are 

making a major 

comeback. 

CONDORS 

In an effort to help 

“heal the world,” 

the Yurok tribe is 

in the early stages 

of a bold effort 

to reintroduce 

the critically 

endangered 

California condor 

to the mountainous 

landscape of 

northern California. 

The tribe considers 

the charismatic 

bird a sacred 

animal. In Idaho, 

meanwhile, the Nez 

Perce people are 

preparing a condor 

restoration project 

of their own. 

wheel. State and federal officials as well as local agricultural 

interests, he adds, don’t have much of a say in the matter. 

Washington’s wildlife authorities are well aware of the tribes’ 

prerogative to do as they please. 

“They’re a sovereign nation and they’re releasing animals 

on their land,” says Rich Harris, a section manager with the 

Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife. “We communicate, 

we were made aware of [the reintroduction], and we’re 

not objecting to it.” But even if the state had objected, he adds, 

“I don’t think it would have mattered.” 

And so the pronghorn antelope finally came home to the 

shrub-steppe country of the Colville Reservation in January 

of 2016. But finding the fleet-footed creatures—the fastest 

land mammals in North America—is no sure bet. We have a 

day to achieve our goal, and, on this early August morning, 

with the truck bouncing and bobbing over washboard roads, 

we barrel into the backcountry. 

ONCE, before white people were here, 35 million pronghorn 

rambled across the continent, from northern Mexico to central 

Canada, confined more or less to the western side of the 

100 th meridian. Only bison, in their massive millions, outnumbered 

the antelope. The petite and tawny ungulates made 

their living on forbs and shrubs and grasses, migrating where 

the food and the weather were amenable, fearing few predators 

until the colonizers came and changed everything. 

Like so many other species, pronghorn suffered near-extermination 

at the hands of European migrants, with their disruptive 

land-use practices and powerful technologies. Overhunting, 

competition from livestock, and habitat fragmentation had 

a catastrophic effect, says John Byers, a University of Idaho biology 

professor and pronghorn researcher. By the 1920s, there 

were fewer than 20,000 pronghorn left in the United States. In 

Washington, they were wiped out completely. 

“From our anthropologists and historians, we know there 

were pronghorn here,” says Mike Marchand, chairman of 

the Colville confederacy, sitting in his small corner office at 

headquarters. Indeed, paleozoological research suggests that 

pronghorn were present in consistent though limited numbers 

in Washington for much of the last 10,000 years. But they 

have been extirpated for roughly a century. “We don’t know 

the word for antelope,” Marchand adds. “That sort of tells you 

something. It has been a while.” 

Things turned around in the 20 th century. The Boone and 

Crockett Club (a hunting and conservation organization 

founded by Teddy Roosevelt) and the National Audubon 

Society, with support from the White House, established a 

500,000-acre federal antelope refuge in northern Nevada 

in 1936. In the 1960s, the struggling Sonoran subspecies 

received Endangered Species Preservation Act protection. 

Since then, conservation efforts, from habitat restoration to 

hunting restrictions, have continued apace, and there are now 

an estimated 700,000 pronghorn in the U.S. Populations are 

particularly robust in Montana, Wyoming, and Nevada. 

Despite this rebound, however, antelope were still missing 

from Washington at the turn of the new millennium. The 

Colville confederacy was determined to change that. 


THE FIX 

“I think that is the common philosophy 

we have,” says Marchand, a 

mellow fellow sporting a Washington 

Huskies sweatshirt and a Yankees 

cap. “That our traditions are the ultimate 

best and whatever we did in 

the past was probably more pure and 

good for us as people.” 

His nation, he says, is trying to bring 

back what was here before, and what 

was here were hordes of salmon, plentiful 

game, and, of course, pronghorn. 

WHITNEY HAD planned to meet two 

colleagues in the middle of the high 

plateau where the antelope live, and 

from there our group would begin the 

pursuit in earnest. When we arrive at 

the rendezvous, however, the other 

team members are missing. Whitney 

pulls over, gets on the radio, and soon 

discovers why: a flat tire thanks to 

daily beatings from the rugged roads. 

We find the others at the edge of 

an open expanse of prairie grass and 

bitterbrush. As we wait for biologist 

Eric Krausz to jack up the truck and 

replace the tire, Whitney scans the 

land with binoculars. 

There is no sign of them. In the 

parched grass, the tan antelope blend in 

as surely as anonymous pedestrians in 

any metropolis. Their acute vision and 

a top speed of 60 miles per hour mean 

they can avoid potential predators, including 

humans, with relative ease. 

AS WHITNEY and his crew can tell 

you, reintroducing pronghorn to a 

place they haven’t been in a century is 

a tough undertaking. 

In May of 2015, the tribes received 

permission from the state of Nevada 

to take 52 pronghorn, transport them 

to Washington, and release them on 

the reservation. But first, wildlife staffers 

had to prepare the ground for the 

antelopes’ arrival: They spent months 

assessing and improving the quality 

of potential habitat on tribal lands, 

reforming grazing practices, and removing 

barbed-wire fences, which can 

do deadly damage to the species. Then 

the day came to close the deal. 

In late January of 2016, as antelope 

scattered and fled before the staccato 

thwack of a chopper flying low above 

the Nevada plains, a gunner leaned 

out and shot projectile nets at them. 

One by one they were trapped, hauled 

to a staging ground, collared, and 

made as comfortable as possible for 

the long trip ahead. 

Because pronghorn are so energetic, 

they can fatally overheat when handled 

or confined. With this in mind, 

Whitney and his crew had selected the 

coldest time of the year to conduct the 

operation. The team had horse trailers 

at the ready when the captured 

pronghorn were brought in from the 

field. They loaded them up as quickly 

as possible and immediately began the 

14-hour drive from Nevada to Colville. 

“It was crazy,” Whitney says. “We 

threw them in the trailers and as soon 

as a trailer would get full we would get 

on the road.” The crew drove in pairs, 

non-stop, with only brief breaks to fill 

up the gas tank or hit the bathroom. 

After arriving on the reservation, and 

with little further handling, the pronghorn 

were released back into the Washington 

wilds. Tribal members wanted 

to be out on the plateau the next day to 

see their new neighbors, but they were 

told to give the pronghorn space to acclimate 

to their adoptive home. As it 

turned out, even without disruptions 

from human admirers, the ungulates 

struggled—and many failed—to survive. 

OFFICIALS IN Washington tried three 

times in the early 20 th century to 

reintroduce pronghorn. Three times 

they failed. 

Only the tribes have succeeded. 

First to pull it off was the Yakama Nation, 

in central Washington, which in 

2011 restored antelope to its reservation 

after seeking early encouragement 

from the Colville program. Ultimately 

the Colvilles required a few 

additional years to bring their own 

initiative to fruition. 

In the beginning, things were rocky. 

At least 14 of the 52 Colville antelope 

died their first winter, most suffering 

from stress and shock. The rest survived 

and, eventually, thrived. Some 

managed to have babies that spring. A 

small group even ventured beyond the 

reservation, swimming across the Columbia 

to try its luck among the farming 

settlements on the far side. 

For Whitney, it was sweet consolation 

to see the pronghorn colonizing 

other lands. 

“I don’t know if that is desirable for 

the state of Washington or not, but 

for us, we are about restoring the species 

to the state,” he says. The tribes 

plan to reintroduce an additional 50 

antelope to the reservation this year. 

Restoring ecological relationships; 

reviving the species’ cultural significance; 

even hunting the antelope someday—that, 

Whitney says, is the tribes’ 

vision. In our time of indigenous-led 

protests against fossil-fuel development 

and environmental destruction, 

the restoration of native wildlife is 

another strategy that First Peoples are 

deploying to help heal this continent. 

ERIC KRAUSZ’S truck rumbles fast 

in front of us as a technician leans 

out the passenger window holding 

a telemetry antenna, hoping to hear 

signals emitted from the radio collars 

of our quarry. As their vehicle kicks 

up dry dust, Whitney and I fall a bit 

behind. Then way behind. Then the 

other truck is out of sight altogether. 

Then they appear—so suddenly 

that it takes us a second to slow down. 

Nine antelope—small and lithe, with 

alien eyes—burst from a dense lakeside 

thicket. They are less than a hundred 

feet from us but, for some reason, they 

reduce their speed. They stop. They 

stand still, silhouetted against the surrounding 

shrub-steppe. Some of them 

hide behind a hill, only their ears and 

eyes poking above, like scouts surveying 

a battlefield. Two little fawns as cute 

as hay-colored colts stand on skinny 

legs. They stare at us and we stare back. 

Then, with their perfect camouflage 

on full display, they melt away. 

“Oh, man. That was ... it doesn’t get 

any better than that,” Whitney says, 

smiling widely, shocked at our proximity 

to the skittish speedsters. “That 

was ridiculous.” 

We quickly climb into the truck and 

circle back to see if we can manage a 

second sighting. But when we come 

around the hill, we can’t find them. 

The antelope offered us one quick 

glimpse, left us giddy, and were gone. 


• PETER MOSKOWITZ is a freelance writer and author of How to Kill a City: 

Gentrification, Inequality, and the Fight for the Neighborhood. @PTRMSK 

America’s Favorite Gun Researcher 

John Lott is a one-man pro-gun research machine 

whose work has been cited nearly 200 times by the 

National Rifle Association. The problem? Many of his 

peers have major misgivings about his methods. 

BY PETER MOSKOWITZ 

I RETURNED from Orlando 

depressed. I was 

there reporting a few 

days after a man had 

opened fire in a crowded 

nightclub with a semi-automatic 

weapon, killing 49 and wounding 

dozens of others. Mass shootings 

have been a common news item in the 

United States over the last few years, 

but this one seemed different, both in 

its scale and in the response (or lack 

thereof ) that followed. 

After Columbine (two high school 

seniors shot and killed 12 students and 

one teacher), Sandy Hook (one man 

shot and killed 20 six- and seven-yearolds 

and six adults), Fort Hood (an 

Army major shot and killed 13 people 

and injured 30 more), the Navy Yard 

in Washington, D.C. (a man shot and 

killed 12 at a naval base), Aurora (a 

man shot and killed 12 and injured 70 

in a movie theater), and Charlotte (a 

white supremacist shot and killed nine 

black churchgoers), there was at least 

debate about what to do. Background 

checks? End the sale of assault rifles? 

Create an interstate tracking system? 

A few days after Orlando, President 

Barack Obama, speaking on the blocklong 

grass field in the downtown 

district where thousands of mourners 

had left notes to those who died at 

Pulse nightclub, implored lawmakers 

to “do the right thing”—to change 

their minds about background checks, 

to consider legislation, to at least create 

a watch list for suspected terrorists 

who want to purchase guns. It was 

a milquetoast speech. And nothing 

followed it. There were no new laws; 

the push for background checks failed. 

The usual debate that had raged in the 

U.S. after mass shootings in the past 

did not happen after Orlando. Calls 

for specific action had turned into 

pleas to at least acknowledge there 

was a problem. It was the deadliest 

mass shooting in modern U.S. history, 

and yet the debate had gone so far 

backwards that gun-control advocates 

were no longer advocating for control, 

but for some debate about control. 

ILLUSTRATION BY MIKE MCQUADE 


THE FIX 

In Orlando, I’d attended a gun show 

where, outside, an LED sign had been 

set up to scroll the hashtag #PrayForOrlando, 

and, inside, everyone told 

me that guns did not kill people. Even 

at the memorial, the same one Obama 

spoke at, yards away from where family 

members of the deceased were gathering, 

crying, adding to a quickly growing 

pile of flowers and homemade signs 

with their letters streaked from a nearconstant 

drizzle, people told me that 

this was not about guns, that actually 

guns were good, that really the solution 

was more guns—guns at home, guns 

on the street, guns at clubs (or at least 

security guards with guns). There was 

relatively little gun debate in Orlando 

after Pulse, virtually no gun debate 

in Congress. There was just a general 

feeling that guns are good, and a feeling 

that, if you believe that, you’re right. 

A man named John Lott can be assigned 

a degree of responsibility. 

Lott is a one-man pro-gun research 

machine. He’s published four books 

on the subject. He speaks at countless 

conferences and colleges. He writes 

dozens of op-eds each year, and is 

cited in thousands of news stories. If 

you know a statistic or a fact-based 

argument about how guns save lives, 

it’s likely, whether you know it or not, 

you’re citing some of Lott’s work. Lott 

is not affiliated with any university, 

and hasn’t been for years. Little of his 

gun research has been published in 

peer-reviewed journals. And yet he is, 

without a doubt, the most influential 

pro-gun researcher in the U.S. 

I will not be able to debunk Lott here 

and now. I am not an academic. I—and 

99 percent of people, I’d venture to 

guess—am not as good with statistics 

as Lott. What I can tell you is what the 

people who do have that skillset say. 

There are many people who agree with 

Lott—especially in the fields of criminology 

and economics. But it appears 

the majority of researchers who work 

in the field say Lott’s wrong: that his 

analyses are misleading, that they skew 

data to favor certain outcomes, and that 

his research methods don’t stand up to 

scrutiny. If they did, his critics say, Lott 

would still be published in academic 

journals, or doing his research out of a 

university instead of a non-profit called 

the Crime Prevention Research Center. 

AFTER A BIT of coaxing, Lott agreed 

to meet me at a debate on campuscarry 

laws he’d be participating in at 

Baylor University in Waco, Texas. Lott 

arrived at the debate, his hair wispy, 

his suit loose-fitting, his shirt tucked 

in only halfway. The mostly conservative 

students who filed into the auditorium, 

dressed in well-fitting skirts 

and heels and khakis and boat shoes, 

looked like the best of conservative 

America—professional, jovial, past the 

more juvenile aspects of college. But 

Lott’s look just added to his authenticity. 

He exudes professorial vibes. He 

does not look like a snake-oil salesman. 

He is, it seems, a true believer. 

The school’s chapter of the Federalist 

Society, a national conservative group, 

had invited him here. According to Lott 

and another organizer, it took months 

to set the meeting up—first there was 

mysteriously no classroom available 

in the law school, where the Federalist 

Society usually held events, and then 

no one would debate Lott. Lott told me 

he’d reached out to around 20 people, 

including professors at Baylor, with no 

luck. The backdrop was this: Texas had 

recently passed a law mandating that 

public universities allow students to 

carry weapons on campus. It sparked 

protests at public schools, and pushed 

leaders of private schools to come down 

on a side of the gun debate. Ken Starr, 

Baylor’s president at the time, banned 

weapons from campus, a move a vocal 

minority of students disagreed with. So 

it made sense professors did not want 

to broach the issue. Instead, Lott found 

Andrea Brauer, the executive director 

of Texas Gun Sense, a small non-profit 

that pushes for small changes in gun 

laws in Texas. 

The debate went well for Lott—he 

arrived prepared with a PowerPoint 

chock full of data, most of which was 

based on his own research from his 

seminal book More Guns, Less Crime, 

published in 1998. He hit on all the progun 

tropes, and backed them with numbers—terrorists 

pick gun-free zones, 

he said; public shootings happen more 

frequently in Europe; good guys with 

guns stop bad ones. Brauer couldn’t 

compete. She had talking points, but 

she was not a researcher, she could 

not debunk him on technical grounds, 

and the audience was already in Lott’s 

pocket. She stumbled over her words. 

She let Lott speak over her and could 

only answer many of his retorts by saying 

he was wrong, but that she did not 

have the data to prove it. “Aren’t you 

making a feelings-based argument,” 

one student asked her. “That’s good for 

you, throwing your opinion out there,” 

another student said after the debate. 

“I know his research is flawed,” 

Brauer told me afterwards. “A lot has 

been discredited. But it’s hard to argue 

with him.” 

Lott’s main assertion is that states 

that pass right-to-carry laws (laws that 

allow you to carry a concealed handgun) 

have significantly lowered their 

crime rates. Lott first made the claim in 

a 1997 study that he conducted while at 

the University of Chicago, along with 

David Mustard, then a graduate student 

at the University of Chicago and now a 

respected economist at the University 

of Georgia. Lott expanded on the study 

in his More Guns book, a herculean 

undertaking: Lott, with a few assistants, 

collected 15 years’ worth of gun and 

violence data from 3,054 U.S. counties. 

It was, and still is, one of the grandest 

studies of gun violence ever conducted. 

Lott found that, were all 50 states to 

pass concealed-carry laws, more than 

1,500 murders, 60,000 aggravated assaults, 

and 4,000 rapes could be avoided 

per year. The influential criminologist 

Gary Kleck told Mother Jones that 

Lott’s early work “was light-years ahead 

of anybody else at the time.” 

Even those prone to support gun 

control agreed it was an impressive 

body of work. And for those who 

agree with Lott, More Guns remains 

one of the most important works in 

the field to date. 

“A lot of his research is some of the 

most highly cited research on firearms,” 

says Mustard, who hasn’t conducted 

research with Lott since their original 

project, though they’ve collaborated in 

other ways. “It’s clearly the most highly 

cited by academics and it’s also incredibly 

frequently cited by politicians.” 


SOLUTIONS, AND THE PEOPLE WORKING TOWARD THEM 

Lott’s work quickly became a favorite 

of pro-gun legislators, academics, and 

policy wonks, including at the National 

Rifle Association (the group’s Institute 

for Legislative Action has cited his 

work 175 times). And Lott’s research 

attracted media attention. According 

to one count, his work has been cited 

no fewer than 1,100 times in newspapers. 

After More Guns, Less Crime was 

published, Lott rose to be the most 

prominent gun researcher in America 

by far—appearing on television shows 

dozens of times a year, constantly touring 

college campuses, cited by state 

and federal lawmakers in gun-policy 

debates—all while being, according to 

many of his colleagues, wrong about his 

research. But that just shows the bias of 

academia, according to Lott. 

“In a field such as public health, I 

suspect a school like Harvard University 

may not even have a single Republican,” 

Lott wrote me in an email 

(he insisted on email after our initial 

in-person interview). “No matter how 

well done my research is there is no 

way someone who wrote the types of 

studies that I do would ever get hired 

there. The entire field is like that.” 

But researchers told me their qualms 

with Lott originate not in the field of 

politics, but basic scientific method. 

Several pointed out that concealedcarry 

laws tend to be passed after a 

spike in violent crime, and that many of 

the states Lott researched for his 1997 

paper passed laws right after the crack 

epidemic. But, as researchers have 

pointed out, most concealed-carry permits 

are issued to white men outside of 

urban areas, so Lott was measuring two 

separate trends—an increase in violent 

crime associated with the crack epidemic 

in urban areas, and an increase 

in concealed-carry permits in rural 

areas—and then concluding they influenced 

each other. Lott did discuss the 

crack epidemic in a footnote in 1997, 

and the rural-urban issue in later research 

that appeared in the influential 

American Economic Review, but he continued 

defending his position long after 

the scholarly consensus rejected it. 

“He’s able to find things in data that 

most people don’t,” says Daniel Webster, 

a professor of health policy at 

the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School 

of Public Health and the director of 

the school’s Center for Gun Policy 

and Research, noting that Lott hasn’t 

been peer-reviewed for his gun research 

in over a decade. 

Other researchers have found it 

problematic that Lott’s landmark 

1997 paper depended on the state of 

Florida and incorporated crime data 

he collected from police departments 

on his own, as opposed to relying 

solely on data from the Federal Bureau 

of Investigation. If you take out 

Florida, Lott’s claimed reductions in 

crime become much less dramatic. 

AFTER SANDY HOOK, Evan DeFilippis 

and Devin Hughes, two young, 

independent gun researchers, noticed 

the usual slew of pro-gun arguments 

on Facebook from conservative family 

members and friends. They realized 

that nearly all who used statistics 

in an attempt to prove that guns were 

safe relied solely on Lott’s work. 

As undergraduates at the University 

of Oklahoma, DeFilippis and 

Hughes began looking carefully into 

Lott’s research. They found that his 

models only worked under strict and 

often unrealistic conditions. Adding 

new variables often produced results 

that didn’t match real-world observations—a 

conclusion other researchers 

have also reached. 

“To debunk him, you have to dive 

down this rabbit hole [of data],” 

Hughes says. “People just don’t want 

to go down that rabbit hole, and they 

don’t realize how important he is to 

the entire pro-gun narrative.” 

In the four years immediately following 

the conclusion of Lott’s 1997 

study, 14 more jurisdictions passed 

concealed-carry laws. Ian Ayres, a 

lawyer and economist at Yale Law 

School, and Stanford Law School 

professor John Donohue, both of 

whom have published extensively on 

gun control, jointly wrote a 106-page 

takedown of Lott’s work in 2002. 

They decided to add those 14 jurisdictions 

to Lott’s models, and found that, 

in every jurisdiction, all categories of 

crime increased after concealed-carry 

laws were passed. 

David Hemenway, a professor of 

health policy at Harvard, found that, 

if you increase the unemployment 

rates in Lott’s models, homicides drop 

dramatically—the opposite of what 

research on gun violence and unemployment 

shows. And if you reduce the 

number of black women age 40 to 49 in 

Lott’s models by 1 percent, homicides 

drop by 59 percent and rapes increase 

by 74 percent. Hemenway argued that 

such massive effects from such a tiny 

change in just one demographic suggest 

Lott’s model is “no good.” Lott, 

as he usually does when criticized, 

responded with a litany of blog posts, 

op-eds, and media appearances. 

The failure of variable-testing 

Hemenway identified in Lott’s work 

is among the clearest signs that his 

methods are flawed. If research is 

strong, it should stand up to being 

tested and picked apart by other 

researchers, which is what the peerreview 

process is for. Lott’s recent 

research hasn’t gotten the same scrutiny 

most scientific researchers do, 

because if it did, other researchers 

told me, it would be torn apart. 

“He is, perhaps, perceived by some 

[to have] the same credibility as myself 

or other people who have published 

tons of stuff in scientific, peer-reviewed 

literature and have been through rigorous 

academic vetting,” Webster says. 

“He’s just some guy who anointed himself 

as the pro-gun researcher.” 

“What I dislike is he says all these 

things that are clearly wrong, and his 

science is not very good at all,” Hemenway 

says. John Donohue says Lott 

obfuscates with bad data, and won’t admit 

when he’s wrong. “Lott’s work was 

mainstreamed very quickly because 

it did appeal to a powerful economic 

interest, and political interests, and so 

the work got more prominence more 

rapidly than it probably deserved.” 

“What I’ve found over the years, 

at least for me, is the best way to 

move forward is to kind of pretend 

he doesn’t exist,” says Stephen Teret, 

another professor at the Bloomberg 

School of Public Health who is familiar 

with Lott’s work. 

These researchers hold the majority 

opinion. Hemenway, with the help 


THE FIX 

of his graduate students, compiled 

a list of academics in peer-reviewed 

journals who had published on gun 

safety within the last four years. 

Those surveyed came from various 

fields—criminology, economics, political 

science, public health, public 

policy. And there was a clear consensus: 

84 percent concluded guns in the 

home increase the risk of suicide, 64 

percent said guns make homes more 

dangerous in general, and 73 percent 

said guns are used for crimes more 

often than for self-defense. Perhaps 

most damningly for Lott, Hemenway’s 

survey found that only 9 percent of 

researchers thought that concealedcarry 

laws reduced gun violence rates. 

Lott countered with another survey 

showing that a smaller majority of researchers 

from only two fields (criminology 

and economics) agreed with 

him. “They only surveyed academics, 

and only three economists. That’s their 

way of discrediting my research,” he 

said. “They never mention all the published 

studies that confirm my results. 

They always want to make it seem like 

it’s only me saying these things.” Hemenway 

and others have disputed the 

results of Lott’s survey too. 

When challenged on his research, 

Lott has, in the past, resorted to 

odd behavior. He admitted to using 

an alternate online persona named 

Mary Rosh, who would defend Lott’s 

articles. “I shouldn’t have used it, but 

I didn’t want to get directly involved 

with my real name because I could not 

commit large blocks of time to discussions,” 

Lott said once the Rosh debacle 

was uncovered. Lott has also come 

under fire for writing an op-ed under 

the name of a real woman who had a 

stalker and became a gun advocate 

after her college would not provide her 

with adequate protection. Even progun-rights 

outlets like Townhall and 

Reason have criticized these efforts. 

And Lott has never publicly shared 

the data behind one of his most-cited 

statistics—that 98 percent of defensive 

gun use doesn’t even require a gun to 

be fired, just pulled out to scare away 

the attacker or intruder. When the late 

sociologist Otis Dudley Duncan, who 

pioneered the field of human ecology 

at the University of Chicago, asked Lott 

for more raw data, Lott said he’d lost it 

in a hard drive crash. Lott then redid 

the survey with a sample of about 1,000 

people, and found that 13 had used 

a gun in self-defense. Only one had 

actually fired the gun—not the largest 

sample, but even one out of 13 (7 percent) 

is far from the 2 percent that Lott 

has touted for most of his career. 

For every attack lobbed at him, Lott 

has hit back with lengthy posts on his 

blog that attempt to dismantle his 

opponent’s critiques. And in each one 

he dives deep into statistical analyses 

that seem designed to confuse 

more than elucidate. DeFilippis and 

Hughes call this “security through 

obscurity.” Similarly, Rutgers University 

sociologist Ted Goertzel has said 

Lott’s work “would never have been 

taken seriously if it had not been obscured 

by a maze of equations.” 

“I have been willing to debate other 

academics, and I have done so every 

time that I have been asked to do so,” 

Lott wrote me in an email. “I have 

[asked people] many times to try to 

set up debates but it has been very 

difficult to get other academics to 

participate.” 

When DeFilippis debated Lott on a 

liberal radio show a few years ago, he 

experienced the deluge-of-data technique 

firsthand. “You end up getting 

into a high-level, technical debate, 

which is not going to persuade the lay 

audience,” DeFilippis says. “You’re 

fighting an uphill battle.” 

OUTSIDE OF THE Baylor auditorium, 

Lott told me about his journey to 

becoming the most prominent and 

most hated gun researcher: His interest 

in guns, he said, started when he 

was an economist at the Wharton 

School of the University of Pennsylvania. 

Students asked him about his 

thoughts on gun control, and so Lott 

started researching. He wasn’t a gun 

expert then, just an economist. But 

he noticed that, despite the volume 

of gun research, there were few welldesigned 

studies with large sample 

sizes. Around the same time, Lott had 

become disillusioned with the Clinton 

administration. He said he had been a 

Democrat, but found himself starting 

to align with more-conservative belief 

systems. He felt that the response to 

the research he’d started doing on 

guns encouraged his political transformation. 

It appeared to Lott that the 

liberal establishment had gotten everything 

wrong, and that, in their rush 

to prove their progressive fantasies, 

they had ignored the facts. 

By the time Lott’s first research 

came out, he was a researcher at the 

University of Chicago. But his new 

fascination with guns made him a pariah 

there. He says he began receiving 

death threats from gun-control advocates, 

and so his wife and kids moved 

back to Pennsylvania so they wouldn’t 

be harmed if one of the threats ever 

materialized. Then, Lott says, under 

pressure from a gun-conscious mayor, 

the university terminated him because 

of his pro-gun views. (The University 

of Chicago declined to comment on 

the specifics of Lott’s departure.) 

Lott returned to Pennsylvania and 

eventually started the Crime Prevention 

Research Center, which is funded 

through small donations and operates 

with a limited budget. When he flies 

around the country giving talks, it’s 

with his own money. His lifestyle does 

not appear lavish. He seems isolated, 

and he seems impassioned—doing this 

of his own volition, making a decent 

living but not an offensive one. The 

Crime Prevention Research Center is 

mostly run out of his house, in the suburbs 

of Philadelphia. He sleeps little, 

because he does his research at night. 

Seeing Lott slouching in an uncomfortable, 

shiny lounge chair at Baylor 

made me wonder why he does this— 

when so many of his peers say he’s 

wrong, when he’s not being given obscene 

amounts of money for his work, 

when he’s been essentially banished 

from academia, pushed to self-publishing 

and creating fake identities to 

advance his research. 

After half an hour of me trying to 

figure out his motivations, Lott said 

he’d be late if we talked any longer, 

so he got up and opened the double 

doors to the auditorium, where he 

was introduced by a smiling student 

in a suit to a round of applause. 


By Malcolm Harris 

PHOTOS BY JARREN VINK 

Revolutions 

Hiding in 

Plain Sight 

You can find a radical history in even the most 

commonplace object. Here are four everyday things 

that represent a turn in the way we live. 

It’s easy to take the objects around 

us for granted, to assume we know 

how they came to be, and to forget 

the extraordinary roots of ordinary 

things. Stories of invention are often 

hard to verify because every new 

idea stands on the shoulders of older 

ones and they make for great urban 

legends. Adding to the trouble, some 

of the true tales are too good to be 

believed, while others are so counterintuitive 

as to make you reach for 

your Snopes. But the origin stories of 

simple household objects sitting in 

plain sight can tell us more about the 

past (and the present) than we might 

imagine. Here are a few unlikely lessons 

from handy things. 


Transcontinental 

Railroad 

They say necessity is the mother 

of invention, but they don’t say 

whose necessity. Conventional 

wisdom holds that the American 

transcontinental railroad was the 

necessary infrastructure for populating 

the territories, but some scholarship 

has cast doubt on that premise. In 

American History class, we learn that 

the 19 th -century rail system connected 

the country’s territories by increasing 

national mobility enough to conquer 

the West. In retrospect, it looks like the 

only possible solution to the historical 

situation. After all, what were we going 

to use, boats? 

Boats were, in fact, a proposed 

alternative solution. Instead of 

corporate railroads traveling overland, 

some policymakers envisioned 

American production linked through a 

system of waterways and canals. Canal 

expansion was a central part of Henry 

Clay’s “American System” proposal, 

and had he found his way to the White 

House we might be talking about how 

boats won the West. In the 1960s, 

economic historian Robert Fogel ran 

the numbers and argued that, had 

we invested in them, canals may have 

handled westward expansion just as 

well as the rails did. So if it wasn’t 

necessity, why the railroads? 

While railroads are ordered and 

predictable, canals are less so. 

Smugglers have a hard time building 

their own trains, and tracks generally 

go only where they’re supposed to. In 

his book Transportation and Revolt: 

Pigeons, Mules, Canals, and the 

Vanishing Geographies of Subversive 

Mobility, Jacob Shell argues that 

railroads triumphed over canals in part 

because the latter “sparked romantic 

associations with gypsies and exotic 

races; fearful associations with disease, 

smugglers, and criminality; religious 

associations with moral depravity and 

Satanism; and political associations 

with anti-imperial groundswells.” The 

fears weren’t totally unfounded: In 

1866, a small army reportedly made up 

of Irish Americans, Mohawk Indians, 

and black Civil War veterans used 

boats to invade (not yet independent) 

Canada, temporarily seizing Fort Erie. 

These militants tried to commandeer 

the railroads too, but to no avail. 


Bra 

There isn’t really any evidence that 

feminists in the 1960s actually burned 

bras, but the legend has persisted. The 

modern bra, though, wasn’t created to 

restrain women—it was an invention 

that offered both support and 

liberation, created by a busty party girl, 

for busty party girls. One night in the 

early 1910s, young socialite Mary Phelps 

Jacob (who went by the name Caresse 

Crosby for most of her life) was headed 

to an event when—her corset lacking in 

danceability and cramping her flapper 

style—she MacGyvered a sort of halter 

top out of ribbons and handkerchiefs. 

Jacob helped her friends out too, and 

when she figured out she could make 

a real go of it, she applied for a patent 

and opened up a small sweatshop (this 

was garment manufacturing after all) 

as an independent proprietress, rather 

than through her husband. 

But Jacob didn’t have a lifetime 

commitment to being a manufacturer. 

Through an ex-boyfriend, she sold 

the patent to Warner Brothers Corset 

Company (no relation to the movie 

guys) for $1,500—a little over $36,000 

in today’s buying power. Having rid 

herself of the only restraining thing 

in her life, Jacob and her husband, 

Harry Crosby, moved to Paris for a 

while, where they became involved in 

the Lost Generation scene. She had 

intellectual and romantic affairs with 

brilliant weirdos like Henri Cartier- 

Bresson and Buckminster Fuller, was 

rumored to have ghostwritten erotica 

for Henry Miller, and founded an 

English-language press that published 

many pioneering modernists. 

Although inventing the bra was 

barely an adolescent pit stop on 

Jacob’s glamorous trajectory, it did 

suggest what she would get up to 

next. Not only would she dance 

unencumbered through Europe, but 

the patent application was also her first 

piece of published writing, wherein she 

described the bra’s benefits, “some of 

which may be summarized by saying 

that it does not confine the person 

anywhere except where it is needed.” 


Cell Phone 

There is no better symbol of late- 

20 th -century capitalism than the stock 

trader with the bulky cell phone, his 

time so valuable that he has to walk 

around with a big old antennaed brick 

to his ear. How strange, then, that 

this technology has its roots in 1950s 

Soviet Russia. Detailed Soviet records 

are hard to find, but archival material 

from Soviet media and industry reports 

suggests that the cell phone was, in 

part, a communist invention. 

Leonid Kupriyanovich was a Moscow 

engineer, born in 1929, just as what 

had been a feudal empire raced into 

modernity at hitherto unseen speeds. 

As a young man, Kupriyanovich 

tackled a typically Soviet problem: 

how to share. According to the Soviet 

wire service ANP, Kupriyanovich began 

developing radiotelephones that 

shared a common base station, based 

on the research of his countryman 

Dmitry V. Ageev. (Ageev’s work set the 

foundation for Code Division Multiple 

Access cellular networks, still in use.) It 

was a brilliant move, and now we call 

those shared base stations cell towers. 

The 1961 Soviet cell phone fit in the 

palm of the hand and weighed half as 

much as today’s iPhone. 

The Soviet bureaucracy (in a 

characteristic move) prioritized the 

use of early cell-phone research for 

the development of car phones for 

the Soviet upper ranks. Still, according 

to the 2014 Russia Telecom and 

Broadcasting Equipment Producers 

Directory, Kupriyanovich’s “Altay” 

radio-based cell network served 

emergency-service personnel and 

remained in popular use long after the 

fall of the U.S.S.R.

Chocolate 

Chip Cookie 

In an episode of Friends, Lisa Kudrow’s 

character claims that her great-greatgrandmother 

(“Nestley Toulouse”) 

passed down the cookie recipe on the 

back of the chocolate-chip bag. As it 

happens, a woman did single-handedly 

invent chocolate chip cookies, but 

she wasn’t from France—she was 

from Massachusetts. According to a 

popular version of this story, sometime 

in the 1930s Ruth Graves Wakefield 

was baking chocolate cookies at her 

restaurant when, without enough time 

to melt the chocolate, Wakefield threw 

in whole chunks of a Nestlé bar. People 

loved the improvisation, and the rest 

is history. But that’s not quite what 

happened, according to food historian 

Caroline Wyman. 

Wakefield wasn’t a distracted 

proprietress; she was a well-educated 

home economist and chef. In fact, 

Wakefield was something closer to 

the Martha Stewart of her day, and an 

early product of the American publiceducation 

system; she graduated from 

the Framingham State Normal School 

Department of Household Arts in 1924, 

two years after the nation’s second 

teachers college started issuing 

bachelor’s degrees in education. By 

the time she invented the chocolate 

chip cookie, Wakefield already had a 

cookbook: Her Toll House Tried and 

True Recipes went through dozens of 

printings. (According to the Boston 

Globe, the restaurant had never 

been a tollhouse—that was just good 

branding.) 

The cookies became a local delicacy, 

and, after soldiers received them in 

care packages during World War II, the 

adoration went national. The cookies 

became so famous that Nestlé started 

selling bags of chips—and offered 

Wakefield a lifetime of chocolate (and 

$1) for a license on the Toll House 

name and her recipe. 


EXTENDED PROFILES 

Read feature-length 

entries for every 30 under 

30 honoree throughout 

the month of May: 

psmag.com

THE 

30 

TOP 

THINKERS 

UNDER 

30 

This year’s most 

exciting young 

thinkers and 

advocates in policy 

and social justice. 

by Avital Andrews 

& Rosie Spinks 

3-D ILLUSTRATION BY COMRADE 

Most people don’t know that Louis Braille developed his reading 

system for the blind by the time he was 16 years old, or that 

Joan of Arc led France to military victory when she was 17. 

Blaise Pascal invented the calculator at 19. Albert Einstein published 

his theory of special relativity at 26. Young people having 

big ideas is a very old tradition. 

Yet you can’t run for president of the United States, or even 

vice president, until you’re 35. (Remember: It’s popularly believed 

that Jesus was crucified at 33.) You have to be at least 30 

to be a U.S. senator, and at least 25 to be a representative (for 

comparison, King Tut’s reign lasted from when he was about 

nine to his death at around 19). 

More than one-third of Americans are younger than 30, while 

zero—zero—federal lawmakers are. The average age of our sitting 

Congress is 58.5, a glaring demonstration of how grossly 

underrepresented our young people are in halls of power—a 

travesty to anyone who has spent any time surveying the landscape 

of our brightest citizens in their teens and twenties. 

You might think that the most difficult task while culling the 

honorees for Pacific Standard’s annual 30 under 30 list is to 

sleuth out young powerhouse intellectuals who are poised to 

shape society’s coming ideas. You’d be wrong. It is, rather, to 

narrow down the massive field of qualified candidates, and the 

avalanche of knockout nominations, we receive each year. 

There are simply so many young people whose caliber of 

thought and devotion to action outstrip by far the vast majority 

of the older population. Their mental acuity, stamina, and optimism 

more than make up for their lack of experience. 

In fact, their inexperience is often crucial to what they end up 

getting done: More than a few of this year’s crop of phenomenal 

thinkers openly attribute their intrepidness to their naivete. 

They credit the folly of youth with having taken on what they 

did. Some even say, in retrospect, that if they’d known then what 

they know now, they wouldn’t have attempted what they did. 

Many of the young people we interviewed told us that having 

an underrepresented identity is what motivates them to do 

what they do. Some of the people on our list, like the Mexican 

White House staffer who mentors young Latinas, are deliberately 

making themselves visible to the next generation. As Marian 

Wright Edelman, longtime champion for young people, has 

said, “You can’t be what you can’t see.” 

There are also people on our list whose brains literally work 

differently—whether because of autism, or for other reasons. 

(Alan Turing, thought by some to have been on the spectrum, 

was 27 when he built the computing machine that broke Nazi 

codes—suggesting that neurodiversity can be crucial to solving 

the world’s scariest problems.) 

On a personal note, I’ll add that every year when I tell people 

I’m working on this project, some ask, “Isn’t that depressing?” 

They mean, I think, that it must be disheartening to focus on 

people who have accomplished so much so young, while we 

common older folk (I am, let’s say, past 30) live our commoner, 

older lives. 

“Depressing?” I reply. “No. The opposite.” 

It’s inspiring. It gives me faith for the future. And it’s an honor 

to shine this spotlight. We need to be celebrating young superstars 

in realms besides entertainment so that even younger 

people can aspire even higher. 

Rather than be intimidated by the 30 up-and-comers on 

Pacific Standard’s 2017 list, we should take their existence as a 

needed sign that everything might, after all, turn out OK. 

—AVITAL ANDREWS

Dafne Almazán, 15 

CHILD PSYCHOLOGY 

At 15 years old, Dafne Almazán is Mexico’s youngest child 

psychologist. She finished elementary school at seven, 

high school by 10, undergraduate work by 13, and will 

finish her master’s degree at the Monterrey Institute of 

Technology and High Studies at the age of just 16. 

Perhaps more striking than this slew of accomplishments 

is the passion Almazán brings to her work with gifted 

students at Mexico’s Centro de Atención al Talento, which 

translates to the Talent Attention Center, where Almazán 

works to make sure that special talents don’t go untapped. 

“I see it as a social duty to my country to help its talent 

to thrive,” Almazán says. “I have a goal of creating an 

adequate education option for gifted students.” —RS 

36 MAY/JUNE 2017 • PSMAG.COM 3 0 U N D E R 3 0 

Lily S. Axelrod, 29 

IMMIGRATION LAW 

Lily S. Axelrod grew up attuned to the concerns of American 

immigrants: Her paternal grandmother fled violence against 

Jews in Poland and came to the U.S. in the 1920s. “I became 

committed to the idea that America is a country of refuge, 

and that in every generation we benefit from the diversity 

and ambition of newcomers.” Now, after graduating cum 

laude from Harvard Law School, she’s an immigration lawyer 

who focuses on deportation defense—which largely involves 

getting her clients out of immigration detention and keeping 

their families united in the U.S. Axelrod has a long-term 

goal of “untangling the immigration bureaucracy from the 

criminal justice system” and helping bring “an absolute end 

to immigration detention.” —RS 

Jacob Barnett, 18 

PHYSICS 

When Jacob Barnett was two years old, doctors told his 

mother Kristine that he would probably never be able to 

talk, read, or even tie his shoes. He had moderate to severe 

autism, they informed her. So Kristine started teaching 

him herself, focusing on his passion for math and science. 

Suddenly, at age three, he spoke four languages and could 

answer complicated astrophysics questions, even though 

no one had taught him the subject matter. 

At 10, he was officially a college student. At 13, he was 

a published physicist and soon became the youngest 

student ever admitted to the Perimeter Institute, where 

his mentor and adviser is Lee Smolin, the famous physicist 

who has been called a “necessary troublemaker.” —AA 

Tamma Carleton, 29 

ENVIRONMENTAL ECONOMICS 

Tamma Carleton is a Ph.D. candidate in agricultural and 

resource economics at the University of California–Berkeley. 

She’s also been a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University and 

the recipient of the Environmental Protection Agency’s 

Science to Achieve Results Fellowship. In her research, 

Carleton combines social and physical data with statistical 

models to assess how issues such as climate change and 

freshwater scarcity affect poverty and economic growth. 

“As the human environmental footprint takes on a 

global scale, I feel that each day I have two choices. One 

is to shrink back from this problem. The other is to do 

everything I can to try to inform solutions,” Carleton says. 

“Most days, I choose the latter.” —RS 

Sean Chen, 26 

URBAN PLANNING 

A city planner and economist, Sean Chen is currently a 

fellow with the Army Corps of Engineers as part of the 

Scholars in the Nation’s Service Initiative at Princeton 

University. His work at the corps’ Institute for Water 

Resources centers on evaluating the economic and social 

benefits of various engineering projects, as well as working 

on innovative solutions to improve public decision-making 

through green infrastructure. 

“On one hand, I want to contribute to the underlying 

theory and understanding of cities as social systems,” he 

says. “On the other hand, there is a lot to be done actually on 

the ground. If I can one day visit a place and say that I helped 

make it a more livable and beautiful place, I’ll be happy.” —RS 

PHOTOS COURTESY CAITLIN DONOVAN, ED RUBIN & PRINCETON ALUMNI WEEKLY

June Eric-Udorie, 18 

GENDER ACTIVISM 

A writer and activist for girls’ and women’s rights, June 

Eric-Udorie was born in Dublin to Nigerian parents and 

was subsequently brought up in Nigeria, the United 

Kingdom, and Ireland. In childhood, she heard stories 

about her grandmother’s decision to protect her mother 

from the practice of female genital mutilation, or FGM, 

and was inspired to a life of activism. Now, at just 18, 

she’s written about FGM and other gender rights-related 

topics for major publications including the Guardian, 

New Statesman, Fusion, and others, and she is editing an 

anthology of essays due to be published in the spring. At 

the moment, she’s an editorial trainee at Penguin Random 

House U.K. —RS 

Cristina Flores, 26 

POLITICS 

Yvonne Dean-Bailey, 21 

STATE POLITICS 

In 2015, Yvonne Dean-Bailey was the youngest Republican 

woman to be elected to the New Hampshire House of 

Representatives, where she also serves as vice chairman of 

the Election Law Committee. 

Since New Hampshire State House members serve parttime, 

most have a day job as well. Dean-Bailey works for a 

company that carries out direct-marketing campaigns for 

candidates, non-profits, and small businesses. Dean-Bailey 

sees the opportunity to serve her state as an immense 

opportunity and responsibility. 

“I love my state and I want to preserve the best parts 

about it: our natural beauty, economic and social freedom, 

and the sense of community,” Dean-Bailey says. —RS 

As a child, Cristina Flores dreamed of becoming president 

and, at 26, she already has four years of experience 

working for the White House. She interned in the office 

of the First Lady, and later served as the White House’s 

associate director of Hispanic media. Flores was also part 

of the White House’s advance team, working directly with 

Joe and Jill Biden. Incredibly, Flores has held an additional 

full-time job throughout all this. 

Today, she is the National Women’s Business Council’s 

marketing and engagement manager, overseeing 

the federal advisory council’s communication and 

digital media strategy, as well as engaging with all its 

stakeholders—a role she has held since 2016. —AA 

Rebecca Garcia, 26 

COMPUTER LITERACY 

Rebecca Garcia is a coder, activist, and co-founder of 

the non-profit CoderDojo NYC, where she teaches young 

people aged seven to 17 coding skills. 

Before founding CoderDojo NYC, Garcia worked for 

Squarespace and as a developer at DoSomething, a 

non-profit focused on youth and social change. She also 

currently serves as the program manager at Microsoft’s 

Tech Jobs Academy, which helps underrepresented 

New Yorkers get into the IT profession. Garcia describes 

herself as having a “never-ending amount of curiosity” 

and says that all her work will be a success if the diversity 

conversation at the world’s top technology firms becomes 

obsolete. —RS 

Yaa Gyasi, 27 

LITERATURE 

When Yaa Gyasi was two years old, she moved with her 

parents and two brothers from Mampong, Ghana, to the U.S. 

Her debut novel, Homegoing, took seven years to finish. By 

the time it was done, the manuscript had sparked a bidding 

contest among 10 book publishers, with Knopf winning the 

sale with an offer of over $1 million. It was a good purchase: 

Homegoing was a New York Times bestseller for nine weeks. 

Gyasi wrote Homegoing, in part, while she was a 

graduate student at the prestigious Iowa Writers’ 

Workshop. Before that, she was an undergraduate at 

Stanford University, majoring in English with an emphasis 

on creative writing. “I hope my books continue to expand 

ideas of what is possible in fiction,” she says. —AA 

3 0 U N D E R 3 0 

MAY/JUNE 2017 • PSMAG.COM 37 

PHOTO COURTESY CHERYL BARNHART

Jewell Jones, 22 

STATE POLITICS 

In last November’s election, Jewell Jones made history 

as the youngest person ever elected to the Michigan 

State House of Representatives, beating his Republican 

opponent with 64 percent of the vote. 

Jewell serves Michigan’s 11 th State House District—a 

constituency that comprises roughly 63,000 people. “I 

think making history, showing young people that it is 

possible—that is my proudest achievement,” Jones says. 

“Showing young people that it is critical to get off the 

sidelines and get involved. Showing young people that we 

are the generation of change.” 

Focusing on his term ahead, Jones hopes to foster and 

implement more youth-driven ideas in the community. —RS 


Cody Karutz, 29 

FILM & VIRTUAL REALITY 

Cody Karutz is the founder and creative director of Blue 

Trot, a company that uses academic research to create 

compelling environmental education. He spent six years 

doing research at Stanford University’s Virtual Human 

Interaction Lab. Today, he creates and designs direct-media 

experiences (using both virtual and augmented reality) 

that tell stories about the environment. Karutz’s directorial 

debut and educational virtual reality experience, The 

Crystal Reef, premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2016. 

“It seems paradoxical that we need a digital screen 

to make us feel closer to nature,” Karutz says, “but that 

is part of what it will take for us to make significant 

environmental behavior change.” —RS 

Michael Li, 19 

NEUROSCIENCE 

Now a freshman at Princeton, Michael Li has already been a 

finalist in the Intel Science Talent Search in 2016, one of the 

nation’s most revered pre-collegiate science competitions. 

For his project, Li developed a statistical model that 

studies how neurons in the part of the brain involved in 

sensory processing—known as the posterior parietal cortex, 

or PPC—engage in complex decision-making. 

Down the line, Li says, this kind of research could be 

applied to advancing the treatment of degenerative 

neurological diseases. 

Li is also interested in the field of machine learning— 

“how we can apply our understanding of brain processes 

to developing intelligent machines.” —RS 

Bernadette Lim, 22 

MEDICINE & GENDER-RIGHTS ACTIVISM 

Bernadette Lim is the founder of Women SPEAK, an 

international women’s empowerment organization based 

in Los Angeles, which cultivates mentorship among young 

women. Since its founding in 2014, Women SPEAK has 

founded more than 20 chapters across the world, serving 

more than 750 young women. Lim is also currently a 

Fulbright scholar in Pune, India, where she is researching 

the gender disparities among health-care workers. In 2017, 

she will attend medical school with a plan to specialize in 

obstetrics and gynecology. Over the long term, Lim plans 

to serve as an OB/GYN physician in underserved areas in 

the U.S., and says her ideal future involves a blend of health 

policy and entrepreneurship. —RS 

Sara Minkara, 27 

PUBLIC POLICY & ACTIVISM 

Sara Minkara knows what it’s like to be perceived as different. 

As a blind person and a Muslim-American woman, she has 

spent her entire life having to work harder than others, 

an experience that led the 27-year-old Minkara to start 

Empowerment Through Integration, or ETI. She has made 

it her mission to ensure that blind and impaired children all 

over the world “feel they have the right to dictate how their 

life goes.” Minkara, who earned a master’s in public policy 

at Harvard University in 2014, also runs “dining in the dark” 

events, where participants can question their preconceived 

ideas about sightlessness. “We have broken a lot of 

misconceptions surrounding what blind people can do and 

shown that blindness can be a tool to uncover abilities.” —RS 

PHOTOS COURTESY KIT KARUTZ, MICHAEL LI & THE CREATIVITY FOUNDATION

Tamara Patton, 28 

NUCLEAR DISARMAMENT 

As a Ph.D. student in the Woodrow Wilson School of 

Public and International Affairs at Princeton, Tamara 

Patton studies arms control and disarmament issues, with 

a particular focus on the role that virtual reality can play 

in verification. Her interest in the topic was piqued when 

she studied under Ambassador Thomas Graham Jr. at the 

University of Washington. 

Nuclear disarmament is always an important topic, 

but the issue feels newly relevant in 2017 given 

rising nationalism and a possible realignment among 

superpowers. As Patton sees it, disarmament remains an 

issue on which “human civilization quite literally hangs in 

the balance.” —RS 

Alexander Peysakhovich, 29 

BEHAVIORAL ECONOMICS 

Daquan Oliver, 25 

ENTREPRENEURSHIP & ACTIVISM 

Daquan Oliver is the founder of WeThrive, a non-profit that 

sends undergraduate students to run entrepreneurship 

programs in under-resourced communities. It was 

something that Oliver had planned to do since he was 

a teenager growing up with a single mother in a lowincome 

area. At the end of his undergraduate career at 

Babson College, Oliver had earned a pile of awards, and 

the Clinton Foundation named him to its list of Five Black 

Student Leaders to Watch in 2014. Now, at WeThrive, 

participants create business ventures while gaining the life 

skills and positive habits that Oliver believes will help them 

throughout their personal and professional lives. “One of the 

philosophies I live by is embracing chaos,” Oliver says. —RS 

Alexander Peysakhovich is a scientist in Facebook’s 

artificial intelligence research lab as well as a prolific 

scholar with a Ph.D. from Harvard, where he won a teaching 

award. He has also published articles in the New York 

Times, Wired, and several prestigious academic journals. 

Peysakhovich’s interdisciplinary work is driven by his 

deep interest in understanding decision-making—both 

human and machine—and by his desire to figure out how 

artificial intelligence can improve our decision-making 

processes. Making good decisions, as Peysakhovich sees it, 

is all about “building more-accurate representations of the 

world.” If we imbue machines with this ability, he believes, 

it will empower us humans to make smarter decisions. —AA 

Sam Pressler, 24 

PSYCHOLOGY & PERFORMING ARTS 

As an undergraduate at the College of William & Mary, 

Sam Pressler founded the school’s Center for Veterans 

Engagement. Today he’s the founder and executive 

director of the Armed Services Arts Partnership, where 

Pressler makes sure that the veterans he works with— 

many of whom deal with post-traumatic stress disorder, 

brain injuries, anxiety, depression, and other post-war 

difficulties—have the resources and guidance they need to 

write comic, literary, or musical pieces about their wartime 

and homecoming experiences. 

“The arts,” he explains, “do not just support veterans as 

they come home from war—they also help civilians learn 

how to welcome our veterans home.” —AA 

Jesse Reising, 27 

LAW & EDUCATION 

After undergraduate work at Yale University and a J.D. from 

Harvard Law, Jesse Reising is now a federal prosecutor in 

the Department of Justice’s antitrust division. He’s also 

co-founder of the Warrior-Scholar Project, a non-profit that 

gives veterans who are first-time college students a free 

two-week course to ensure subsequent academic success. 

In his final season playing football for Yale, Reising 

sustained a neck injury that left his right arm mostly 

paralyzed and dashed his hopes of being a Marine. Founding 

WSP, he says, came from his desire “to serve those serving in 

the military in my place.” WSP has already helped more than 

500 veterans. “Education can help harness veterans’ patriotic 

energy in ways that improve our nation,” Reising says. —AA 

3 0 U N D E R 3 0 


PHOTO COURTESY MELANIE STETSON FREEMAN/THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR

Victoria M. Rodríguez-Roldán, 28 

TRANSGENDER ACTIVISM 

Victoria M. Rodríguez-Roldán came out as a transgender 

woman in her teens and was diagnosed with bipolar 

disorder in her mid-20s. Now a graduate of the University 

of Maine School of Law, she works on behalf of trans and 

gender-non-conforming people in her role as Trans/GNC 

Justice Project director at the National LGBTQ Task Force, 

where she focuses her policy efforts on “the intersection 

between disability, mental health, and trans identity.” 

She works on engaging with policymakers throughout 

Congress and various government agencies to help promote 

policies that will benefit the trans community. “Let me tell 

you, you do not get used to seeing [injustice],” she says, “and 

that’s a good thing. You can’t let your heart go numb.” —RS 


Aviva Rosman, 28 

VOTER MOBILIZATION 

After a four-year stint with Teach for America and a master’s 

degree in public policy at the University of Chicago, Aviva 

Rosman co-founded BallotReady in 2015, a non-partisan 

online guide to political races and referendums in the U.S. 

BallotReady’s mission is to make it easier for voters to make 

informed choices throughout an entire ballot, not just the 

top-ballot race that gets the most media coverage. In 2016’s 

elections, BallotReady offered guidance in 12 states and 

the District of Columbia, covering about 15,000 candidates 

and 300 referendums. Indeed, research conducted with 

the Massachusetts Institute of Technology showed that, in 

Kentucky’s 2015 general election, eligible voters who used 

BallotReady were 20 percent more likely to vote. —RS 

Annie Ryu, 26 

SOCIAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP 

Annie Ryu graduated summa cum laude from Harvard. 

Now, the 26-year-old social entrepreneur’s life centers 

around jackfruit, a large, green, studded fruit native 

to Southeast Asia. In the face of climate change, the 

fruit’s nutritional properties make it a viable (and more 

sustainable) alternative to imperiled staple crops like 

wheat and corn—as well as a popular meat substitute. 

The exotic-fruit-based career path came as something 

of a surprise, but, as Ryu sees it, “replacing meat with a 

fruit that grows on trees, is superabundant, thrives without 

agricultural inputs, and is nutritious and satisfying to the 

consumer—this is a fundamentally scalable solution to 

multiple global problems.” —RS 

Hannah Safford, 25 

ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY 

After her undergraduate degree in chemical engineering at 

Princeton, Hannah Safford spent two years as a fellow in the 

White House Office of Science and Technology Policy—a 

job she began at just 22 years old—where she took on tasks 

like organizing the first-ever White House Water Summit, 

which brought together more than a hundred experts in 

water policy and innovation. Safford’s next step is a Ph.D. 

in environmental engineering, which she’ll begin in the fall. 

“Recycling bottles and driving less is all well and good, but, 

at the end of the day, tackling big problems like climate 

change requires behavioral and technological shifts on a 

much larger scale,” Safford says. “Thoughtful government 

helps these shifts occur successfully.” —RS 

Erin Schrode, 26 

POLITICS & ENVIRONMENTALISM 

Erin Schrode is an accomplished activist, writer, and 

corporate adviser, but her 2016 run for Congress is her 

proudest accomplishment. “I’ve never done something 

where I felt more relevant, where I felt I could make a 

greater impact,” she says. Though she didn’t win, Schrode 

received nearly 21,000 votes in California’s Second 

Congressional District, running on a platform of climate 

action and social justice. Most recently, Schrode went with 

filmmaker Josh Fox to Standing Rock in North Dakota. “It’s 

the fight of our time,” Schrode says. “It’s about climate 

change, national security, Native sovereignty. It’s about 

the potential contamination of 17 million people’s drinking 

water. It’s not a matter of if but when it’ll burst.” —AA 

PHOTO COURTESY KATHERINE ELGIN PHOTOGRAPHY

Boyan Slat, 22 

ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE 

Boyan Slat, founder of the non-profit The Ocean Cleanup, 

estimates that it’ll cost several hundred million dollars to 

get the trash out of the world’s oceans. He also predicts 

that, if the plastic that’s collected is sold to recyclers, it 

would go for more than $500 million. “This is more than 

the plan would cost to execute,” he points out. “In other 

words, it’s profitable.” 

His proudest accomplishment so far, he says, is his 

328-foot-long North Sea Prototype, which he deployed last 

year off the Netherlands, anchoring it with cables nearly 

three miles long. It’s still being tested, but if it works—and 

it looks like it might—a more extensive pilot system will be 

set up in waters in the Pacific later this year. —AA 

Thomas Tasche, 26 

INTERNATIONAL POLICY & POLITICAL ECONOMICS 

Peng Shi, 29 

DATA SCIENCE 

A soon-to-be tenure-track faculty member in data science 

at the University of Southern California’s Marshall School 

of Business, Peng Shi holds a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts 

Institute of Technology. His work uses data modeling to help 

make the global marketplace more efficient and equitable. 

“If you design the right rules that govern a marketplace— 

despite self-seeking behavior from participants—the overall 

outcome can still be good for society,” Shi says. 

Shi moved from China to Canada at the age of 11 and 

says the biggest change was being exposed to Christianity. 

“When I was around 13, I became a Christian, being the first 

in my family to make this decision, and this has profoundly 

influenced my values, goals, and perspectives.” —RS 

Before pursuing his master’s in public affairs at the 

Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton, Thomas Tasche 

was a policy advisor at both the European Bank for 

Reconstruction and Development and at the Department 

of the Treasury. Though he is a social scientist, Tasche 

describes his approach to research as “omnivorous.” 

His thesis on Chinese investment in the Caribbean was 

awarded the Lieutenant John A. Larkin Memorial Prize— 

which recognizes the best thesis in the field of political 

economy—for its examination of the superpower’s 

activities in less-prominent corners of the globe. It’s a 

topic that seems to suit Tasche’s belief that expected 

paths of research aren’t the most instructive. —RS 

Alexis Toliver, 23 

NEUROSCIENCE & PUBLIC POLICY 

Alexis Toliver is a neurobiology researcher at Harvard 

Medical School and co-founder of the Harriet Tubman 

Collective, a group of black disabled activists. Her brain 

research has been useful in helping people who’ve had a 

stroke regain their ability to walk. Toliver is also autistic, 

and has dealt with depression and social anxiety. 

“I am a black, disabled woman who fights for all forms 

of justice,” she says. Eventually, Toliver plans to go to 

graduate school to study autism. 

Most of Toliver’s advocacy these days deals with 

the fact that “disabled folks are systemically silenced, 

murdered by police, electrocuted, stigmatized, and 

constantly subjected to violence by the able-bodied.” —AA 

Anthony Lee Zhang, 23 

ECONOMICS 

As an undergraduate at the University of Chicago, Anthony 

Lee Zhang planned to become a biochemist, just like his 

father. But a course in economics with Glen Weyl changed 

his mind. Zhang switched majors, graduating with a 

bachelor’s degree in economics and snagging a prize along 

the way: the Becker Friedman Institute Award for Academic 

Achievement in Microeconomics, given annually to the 

University of Chicago’s best microeconomics student. 

Zhang then spent a year doing data science for 

Facebook’s analytics group. Today, Zhang is at Stanford, 

getting his Ph.D. in economic analysis and policy. In the 

meantime, Zhang isn’t just Weyl’s protege—he’s also his 

co-author. —AA 

3 0 U N D E R 3 0 


PHOTOS COURTESY CHARIS LOH PHOTOGRAPHY & KATHERINE ELGIN PHOTOGRAPHY

These visionaries did some of their most 

important work after retirement—proving that 

you’re never too old to make a difference. 

by Avital Andrews 

3-D ILLUSTRATION BY COMRADE 

If you think that change-making is just for young people, these six revolutionaries 

will change your mind. Each is at least 80 years old, and each has postretirement 

accomplishments more spectacular than most people’s life’s work. 

They’re part of the gray-haired “encore movement,” a wave of elders who are using 

their golden years to do potent social justice work. Though older people are 

still undervalued—for Americans, ageism deepens with each birthday—these 

post-career octogenarians and nonagenarians have made themselves crucial 

to the communities they serve, proving the value and power of a late-life pivot.

KITTY 

WILLIAMS 

92 

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 

BETTY 

TAYLOR 

91 

BETTY TAYLOR grew up in 

Kentucky and Illinois wanting to be 

a teacher, then went on to teach 

high school and college English for 

about 20 years while raising two 

children. During a sabbatical, she 

migrated west to Eugene, Oregon, 

for a year; two years later, she 

returned to complete a doctorate 

from the University of Oregon. 

After retirement, in 1996, Taylor 

ran for Eugene’s city council. Today, 

she’s in her sixth term, at the end 

of which she’ll have represented 

Eugene’s Second Ward for 24 years. 

“I’ve always been concerned 

about injustice,” Taylor says. Perhaps 

her most enduring legacy is helping 

to save the Amazon headwaters, a 

local wetland that was in danger of 

being developed until 2014, after 

Taylor successfully advocated for 

the council to buy and preserve 

26 critical acres. She’s currently 

supporting a resolution against oil 

trains passing through Eugene. 

When asked whether she 

faces age discrimination, Taylor 

says: “Attitudes are sometimes 

condescending, but no. People 

like it that I’m old. Because they’ree 

getting old too, and they want to 

think they can still do something.” 

KITTY WILLIAMS is now a public 

speaker who travels widely, but, 

in the 1920s, hers was the only 

Jewish family in Sáránd, Hungary. 

At 19, she was herded onto a train 

for Auschwitz with her dad, who 

was sent to the gas chamber the 

day they arrived. 

When the American liberators 

came, Williams fell in love with one, 

an Air Force pilot, and followed 

him home. On the train to Iowa, 

“He asked me if I would do him a 

favor,” she remembers, “and not talk 

about the Holocaust or tell anyone 

I was Jewish”—for her own safety. 

Williams was shocked but complied, 

even baptizing their three kids. 

Her husband, an alcoholic, 

abandoned the family, leaving 

Williams a destitute single mother 

in 1950s Iowa. Having begun as 

a teller at State Bank and Trust, 

Williams worked her way up to vice 

president, but her salary remained 

less than half that of her male 

counterparts. Ahead of her second 

marriage, Williams revealed her true 

identity to her new fiancé. “That’s 

when I ‘came out’ and got involved 

with the Jewish community,” she 

says. The Institute for Holocaust 

Education invited her to join its 

speakers’ bureau, and now she 

tells her Holocaust story in schools, 

churches, and libraries—“It’s kind of 

mushrooming,” she says of her new 

role as orator. Today, Williams has 

new purpose. “Old age isn’t easy,” 

she says, “but I’m still here.” 

WILHELMINA 

PERRY 

82 

WILHELMINA PERRY started LGBT 

Faith Leaders of African Descent 

in 2010. The non-profit works 

to reduce homophobia in the 

Christian black community, helps 

ministers learn how to reach LGBT 

African Americans, and provides a 

judgment-free haven for homeless 

gay youth of color. 

Perry grew up in Harlem, went 

to college, got a Ph.D., and became 

a social worker, then a professor 

of social work. Though she had 

always been attracted to women, 

Perry married and divorced 

two men before identifying as a 

lesbian. While teaching at San 

Diego State University, she fell in 

love with a fellow faculty member, 

Antonia Pantoja, a recipient of the 

Presidential Medal of Freedom for 

her activism on behalf of Latino 

civil rights. “Ours was really a love 

story,” Perry says of their 30-year 

partnership. 

After Pantoja died in 2002, 

Perry felt lost and found herself 

contemplating suicide. Then, after a 

50-year absence, she stepped back 

into a church. “It saved my life, ” she 

says. Perry credits her spryness to 

six decades of vegetarianism—and 

spending time with young people. 

M S

ESTELLA 

PYFROM 

80 

CONNY 

CARUSO 

86 

ESTELLA PYFROM worked as an 

educator for 50 years, teaching 

every age from kindergarten 

through 12 th grade. The children 

she taught came from families as 

poor as her own. “When I started 

thinking of retirement,” Pyfrom 

says, “I knew there were still a 

lot of services that needed to be 

provided.” She was especially 

concerned about the digital divide: 

Most of her students didn’t have 

computer or Internet access. “I 

wanted to provide them with 21 st - 

century learning,” she says, “and 

came up with the idea of a bus 

because it was big enough, it could 

get me out into the community— 

and I could drive it.” 

Pyfrom used her retirement 

money to buy and customize a 

bus and outfit it with computers, 

creating a mobile classroom that 

she called Estella’s Brilliant Bus; 

since 2012, she’s been out on the 

road with it, helping underserved 

communities. 

After Pyfrom was named a CNN 

Hero, big donors took notice— 

Microsoft now gives computers, 

and Office Depot provides 

technology support, computers, 

and financial contributions. 

The years aren’t slowing Pyfrom, 

who sleeps only four hours a night. 

“I’m blessed,” she says. “I feel good 

every day. A lot of your age is in 

your mind. Just because you’re 

getting older doesn’t mean you 

can’t still make a difference.” 

JAIME 

YRASTORZA 

86 

JAIME YRASTORZA was born in the 

Philippines. When he was 10, just 

hours after Pearl Harbor, Japan 

bombed the Philippines, then a 

United States colony. The U.S. 

surrendered, beginning a threeyear 

Japanese occupation, by the 

end of which Yrastorza’s mother 

and sister were dead and his father 

was on the run. Determined to 

forge a better life, he applied to 

American colleges and got into the 

University of Minnesota–Duluth. He 

studied dentistry, married a nurse, 

had five kids, moved to Colorado, 

and worked as a maxillofacial 

surgeon for 35 years. 

In his late 50s, Yrastorza 

joined a charity trip to Ecuador 

to operate on children with cleft 

lips and palates; upon his return, 

he decided to do similar work i 

the Philippines. In 1989, Yras za 

took a small group of surgeo 

to 

the Philippines to fix Filipino kids’ 

deformities, inaugurating a n 

profit called Uplift Internatio e 

that he still shepherds today. fa 

Uplift Internationale’s volunt s 

have performed about 1,000 

bono surgeries (Yrastorza ha 

personally done about 100), stl 

on preschoolers. 

CONNY CARUSO had left her 

job as an executive assistant in 

the entertainment industry. Her 

memoir, Foothold in the Mountain, 

had just been published. During 

a book signing, someone in the 

audience called out, “What’s your 

next project?” Without thinking, 

she answered, “I’m going to pay it 

forward.” Except she didn’t know 

how. Soon after, she read a Los 

Angeles Times story about Father 

Gregory Boyle and his Homeboy 

Industries, which employs and 

educates former gang members. 

“I went down there,” Caruso 

remembers. “My homies opened 

the door for me, and I said: ‘Oh 

my God. Heaven isn’t up there. It’s 

right here.’ I haven’t left since.” 

Now, besides raising money, 

organizing events, and getting 

Hollywood bigwigs involved with 

Homeboy Industries, Caruso spends 

hours each week with reformed 

ex-convicts. “I love them,” she says. 

“They’re divine human beings.” The 

felons call her mama. She joins them 

for therapy, recovery meetings, and 

meditation. She encourages them, 

yells at them, hugs them. 

“You get kids who’ve had the 

most horrendous lives—they 

were treated like worms in the 

woodwork,” Caruso says. “If you 

meet them today, there’s nothing 

but love and trust. People ask 

me: ‘Aren’t you afraid? These are 

ous people.’ I say: ‘Are you 

ding? They’re afraid of me 

C H A N G I N G T H E W O R L D A F T E R 

0

THE 

F ALLAC Y 

OF

y 

CHRISTOPHER KETCHAM 

photos by Alejandro Durán

is the unifying faith of industrial civilization. 

That it is nonsensical in the 

extreme, a deluded fantasy, doesn’t 

appear to bother us. We hear the holy 

truth in the decrees of elected officials, 

in the laments of economists 

about flagging GDP, in the authoritative 

pages of opinion, in the whirligig 

of advertising, at the World Bank and 

on Wall Street, in the prospectuses of 

globe-spanning corporations and in 

the halls of the smallest small-town 

chambers of commerce. Growth is 

sacrosanct. Growth will bring jobs 

and income, which allow us entry into 

the state of grace known as affluence, 

which permits us to consume more, 

providing more jobs for more people 

producing more goods and services 

so that the all-mighty economy can 

continue to grow. “Growth is our idol, 

our golden calf,” Herman Daly, an 

economist known for his anti-growth 

heresies, told me recently. 

In the United States, the religion is 

expressed most avidly in the cult of the 

American Dream. The gatekeepers of 

the faith happen to not only be American: 

The Dream is now, and has long 

been, a pandemic disorder. Growth is 

a moral imperative in the developing 

world, we are told, because it will free 

the global poor from deprivation and 

disease. It will enrich and educate the 

women of the world, reducing birth 

rates. It will provide us the means to 

pay for environmental remediation— 

to clean up what so-called economic 

progress has despoiled. It will lift all 

boats, making us all rich, healthy, happy. 

East and West, Asia and Europe, 

communist and capitalist, big business 

and big labor, Nazi and neoliberal, the 

governments of just about every modern 

nation on Earth: All have espoused 

the mad growthist creed. 

In 1970, a team of researchers at the 

Massachusetts Institute of Technology 

began working on what would become 

the most important document of the 

20 th century to question this orthodoxy. 

The scientists spent two years 

holed up in the company of a gigantic 

mainframe computer, plugging data 

into a system dynamics model called 

World3, in the first large-scale effort 

to grasp the implications of growthism 

for mankind. They emerged with a 

book called The Limits to Growth, 

issued as a slim paperback by a littleknown 

publisher in March of 1972. It 

exploded onto the scene, becoming the 

best-selling environmental title in history. 

In the Netherlands half a million 

copies sold within the year. More than 

three million copies have been sold to 

date in at least 30 languages. 

Its message was commonsensical: 

If humans propagate, spread, 

build, consume, and pollute beyond 

the limits of our tiny spinning orb, 

we will have problems. This was not 

what Americans indoctrinated in 

growthism had been accustomed to 

hearing—and never had they heard it 

from Ph.D.’s marshaling data at one of 

the world’s citadels of learning. 

The idea for the Limits study originated 

with a charismatic Italian industrialist 

named Aurelio Peccei, who 

sidelined as a philosopher and author 

on world affairs. Peccei had fought for 

the resistance in Italy—he had been 

captured and tortured by the fascists— 

and had gone on to a spectacular career 

working in industry, notably as an executive 

at Fiat. By 1968, he had begun 

to question the legacy that industrial 

civilization was leaving its children. 

He published a book on the subject, 

The Chasm Ahead, in which he worried 

about the “suicidal ignorance of the 

human condition” on a planet of dwindling 

resources, rampant population 

growth and material consumption, 

mounting pollution and waste. Seeking 

to understand the global system, 

its trajectory, and its prospects for 

survival, Peccei co-founded the Club 

of Rome, a think tank whose purpose 

was to lay bare the “predicament of 

mankind.” The club would sponsor 

the study, and Peccei reached out to 

MIT, where a 29-year-old professor of 

system dynamics named Dennis Meadows, 

who had helped design the World3 

computer program, offered to direct it. 

Meadows and his team used World3 

to examine growth trends worldwide 

that had prevailed from 1900 to 1970, 

extrapolating from the data to model 

12 future scenarios of global development 

and its consequences, projected 

out to the year 2100. They focused on 

the complex feedback loops—the system 

dynamics—that play out when we 

tax the limits of the planet. The team 

separated those limits into two categories: 

sources and sinks. Sources are 

OPENING SPREAD: NUBES, 2011 


those things we need from nature for 

industrial civilization to survive: minerals, 

metals, rare earth elements, fossil 

fuels, fresh water, arable soil. Sinks 

refer to the capacity of the planet to 

absorb pollution of its soil, air, and water, 

and, most ominously, the capacity 

of its atmosphere to absorb carbon. 

A typical if simplified system dynamic 

in the study went like this: 

“Population cannot grow without food, 

food production is increased by growth 

of capital, more capital requires more 

resources, discarded resources become 

pollution, pollution interferes with the 

growth of population and food.” The 

models showed that any system based 

on exponential economic and population 

growth crashed eventually. One 

of the gloomier models was called the 

standard run, in which the “present 

growth trends in world population, industrialization, 

pollution, food production, 

and resource depletion continue 

unchanged.” In that scenario, which 

came to be known as business-as-usual, 

“the limits to growth on this planet will 

be reached sometime within the next 

one hundred years,” the team stated. 

Things end unhappily: “The most probable 

result ... will be a rather sudden 

and uncontrollable decline in both 

population and industrial capacity.” 

Sudden and uncontrollable: in 

other words, a collapse of civilization, 

a collapse that would mean the loss of 

human life, culture, and capital on a 

scale unimaginable. The World3 business-as-usual 

model did not give an 

exact date for the collapse, but suggested 

it would likely begin around 

the middle of the 21 st century. 

immediately 

the subject of vicious attack by the 

defenders of growthism. The first 

salvo arrived in the New York Times in 

April of 1972, a month after publication, 

from the pens of three economics 

professors at Columbia University 

and Harvard University, two of whom 

happened to be publishing a book that 

year about “affluence and its enemies.” 

Limits was “an empty and misleading 

work,” they wrote. It was “less than 

pseudoscience and little more than 

polemical fiction.” It had the “scent of 

technical chicanery.” The insinuation 

was that Meadows’ team had fed bad 

data into their supercomputer, the 

result being, as the Times reviewers 

stated, “garbage in, garbage out.” 

The rebukes piled up over the 

years: in The Economist, Forbes, Foreign 

Affairs, in the halls of academia, 

at Yale, Princeton, Harvard, and even 

at MIT. With an evangelical fervor, 

article after article assured the public 

that the book so badly miscalculated 

our future it should be dismissed 

outright. The most commonly cited 

error ascribed to Limits centered on a 

table of data that suggested the world 

would run out of gold by 1981, petroleum 

by 1992, copper, lead, and natural 

gas by 1993. Other vital minerals— 

silver, tin, zinc, mercury—would be 

gone by 2000. But the book’s authors 

made no such predictions. The data 

was used only to illustrate how exponential 

growth quickly depletes nonrenewable 

natural resources. Nevertheless, 

Limits’ detractors to this day 

continue to cite this allegedly erroneous 

data set to support the claim that 

the modeling was all wrong. 

Worse than any specific prediction, 

however, was that the Limits 

team seemed to be questioning the 

viability of the American Dream. “Limits 

preaches that we must learn to 

make do with what we already have,” 

grumbled the economists writing in 

the Times. The study was an affront to 

the cornucopian credo of mainstream 

economics, which says that pricing and 

innovation will always save us from the 

depletion of sources and the saturation 

of sinks. If a resource becomes scarce 

in the marketplace, economists tell us, 

its price rises, which acts as the signal 

for society to innovate alternatives 

because there’s money to be made doing 

so. If a sink is saturated, technology—priced 

right—will ameliorate the 

effect, scrub the smokestacks, disperse 

the oil spills, and so on. 

This unquestioning faith in the 

magical powers of human ingenuity 

has led economists to make some 

preposterous assertions. Oxford 

University professor Wilfred Beckerman, 

who dubbed Limits “a brazen, 

impudent piece of nonsense,” claimed 

there is “no reason to suppose that 

economic growth cannot continue for 

another 2,500 years.” Carl Kaysen, a 

doyen of economics at Harvard, said 

that, by some calculations, the Earth’s 

“available matter and energy” could 

support a population of around 3.5 

trillion people, all living at American 

standards of affluence. Julian Simon, 

who publicly expressed his loathing 

for Limits, assured us back in 1992 

that “We now have in our hands—in 

our libraries, really—the technology to 

feed, clothe, and supply energy to an 

ever-growing population for the next 7 

billion years.” Elsewhere, he made the 

bizarre declaration that, “in the end, 

copper and oil come out of our minds.” 

The Limits authors were facing off 

against a fundamentalist ideology 

here, one that happened to have the 

winds of history at its back. In the 

two centuries of Western technoindustrial 

civilization that preceded 

the book, the ceilings to population 

and economic growth had been shattered 

again and again by free-marketdriven 

innovation. The doomsayers 

had consistently been proved wrong. 

The 18 th -century political economist 

Thomas Malthus famously predicted 

that exponential growth of population 

would eventually outstrip the capacity 

of land to produce food, and the result 

would be mass starvation. But the 

world innovated its way around hunger 

with the Green Revolution and 

genetically modified organisms and 

the deep-drilling of previously untappable 

aquifers. So it was that Limits 

was relegated to the blinkered realm 

of Malthusian doomsdayism. 

By the 1980s, President Ronald 

Reagan was citing the book in his 

speeches only to ridicule it. “Perhaps 

you remember a report published a 

few years back called The Limits to 

Growth,” he said at the University of 

South Carolina in 1983. There are “no 

such things as limits to growth,” he 

declared to the students in the audience. 

Even the title itself, Reagan 

said, was offensive, because “in this 

vast and wonderful world that God 

has given us, it’s not what’s inside the 

Earth that counts, but what’s inside 

your minds and hearts, because that’s 

the stuff that dreams are made of, and 

America’s future is in your dreams.” 

The effect of this critical backlash 

was that Limits mostly disappeared 

from mainstream discussion. It was 

commonly understood, Meadows 

said, that it would be very inconvenient 

to the high priests of the 

growthist orthodoxy if the public began 

to take the study seriously. Mead- 


ows, who is retired from academia but 

still travels the world to lecture, met 

readers in the 1970s and ’80s who said 

the book had changed their lives. “In 

the 1990s and 2000s, they said, ‘Your 

book changed my parents’ lives.’ 

Now,” he said, “I give a speech and 

people ask, ‘Did you write a book?’” 

last decade, 

Limits has attracted renewed interest 

from ecologists and economists, 

with many having developed their 

own methodologies to gauge its accuracy. 

In 2014, Graham Turner, of 

the Melbourne Sustainable Society 

Institute in Australia, compared the 

book’s standard run projections with 

historical data since 1970. He looked 

at, among other statistics, birth and 

death rates as an approximation of 

population trends, industrial output 

per capita as a measure of development, 

and carbon in the atmosphere 

as a measure of pollution. We are 

hewing pretty closely to business-asusual, 

he concluded, noting that “the 

alignment of data trends with the 

LTG dynamics indicates that the early 

stages of collapse could occur within 

a decade, or might even be underway.” 

In March of 2016, the All-Party Parliamentary 

Group on Limits to Growth 

in the United Kingdom issued a report 

declaring that the 1972 projections 

were worrisomely spot-on. The author 

of the report, Tim Jackson, a professor 

of sustainable development at the University 

of Surrey, told me, “Numerous 

analyses have shown that the historical 

data track very closely the lines of 

the Limits to Growth standard run.” 

Ecologists Charles Hall and John W. 

Day conducted their own comparison 

of Limits’ projections with real-world 

data in 2009, and found the projections 

to be “quite on target. We are not aware 

of any model made by economists that 

is as accurate over such a long time 

span.” Matthew Simmons, the noted 

investment banker whose company 

managed tens of billions of dollars in 

energy-industry mergers and acquisitions, 

offered a similar observation in 

2000. “The most amazing aspect of the 

book,” he wrote, “is how accurate many 

of the basic trend extrapolation[s] ... 

still are 30 years later.” 

On the book’s 20 th anniversary, 

in 1992, Meadows gathered up his 

original team to co-author an update 

called Beyond the Limits, and, in 2004, 

he completed a 30-year update. He 

hoped, in part, to address the most 

widespread critique of the 1972 study: 

that it had underestimated innovation 

and technology, the twin engines of 

industrial civilization and the pillars 

of the growthist faith. The first edition 

of Limits had, in fact, gone a long way 

toward accommodating technology as 

a possible saving grace for the growth 

system. In one of the 12 scenarios, the 

authors modeled a world system “producing 

nuclear power, recycling resources, 

and mining the most remote 

reserves; withholding as many pollutants 

as possible; pushing yields from 

the land to undreamed-of heights; and 

producing only children who are actively 

wanted by their parents.” Nevertheless, 

the authors wrote, “the result 

is still an end to growth before the year 

2100. The application of technological 

solutions alone has prolonged the 

period of population and industrial 

growth, but it has not removed the 

ultimate limits to that growth.” 

The version of World3 that Meadows 

used for the second and third 

editions of the book incorporated the 

possibility of far greater technological 

advances. “But the results and our 

conclusions remained the same,” he 

told me. “In those later runs we even 

assumed infinite resources. But guess 

what? It is still impossible for the human 

population and consumption to 

grow exponentially forever.” 

Now, at the very moment that we 

need innovation to accelerate—to 

mount a viable response to climate 

change, to locate new resources and 

replace dwindling or despoiled ones— 

evidence suggests that the opposite is 

happening. Joseph Tainter, a professor 

of sustainability at Utah State University, 

examined innovation trends using 

30 years of data from the U.S. Patent 

and Trademark Office. What he found 

was troubling. Slightly more than half 

of all patents issued in this country are 

to foreign entities, so Tainter considered 

changes to the number of patents 

per applicant to be an accurate indicator 

of global productivity as expressed 

through invention. In the major 

technical fields he studied—drugs and 

chemicals, metallurgy, energy, biotechnology, 

information technology, 

and so on—he found that the number 

of researchers on each patent steadily 

increased between 1974 and 2005. This 

means more time and man-hours—and 

presumably more money invested—for 

a declining return. In his 1988 book The 

Collapse of Complex Societies—a kind of 

companion volume to Limits—Tainter 

makes the case that as civilizations 

grow they produce increasingly complex 

problems that demand increasingly 

complex solutions. Complexity 

demands more energy, requiring new 

technologies for energy extraction. But, 

as Tainter’s study suggests, innovation 

may have its own limits. 

The concept of energy-return-oninvestment, 

known as EROI, was originally 

coined in reference to fossil-fuel 

exploration, and is commonly used 

to compare the amount of energy required 

to extract, transport, and refine 

a particular resource with the amount 

of energy it ultimately provides. EROI 

for our master energy source happens 

to be plummeting, as discovery 

and extraction of fossil fuels becomes 

more difficult and costly. (The rising 

cost—which is to say complexity—of 

resource extraction and retrieval was 

one of Limits’ broad projections that 

also turned out to be accurate.) EROI 

for global oil and gas production went 

from 30-to-1 in 1995 to 18-to-1 in 2006. 

In the U.S., the EROI for oil discovery 

in 1919 was an astonishing 1,000-to-1. 

By the 2010s, it was 5-to-1. 

In mining, multifactor productivity—which 

reflects the efficiency with 

which the inputs of capital, labor, materials, 

services, and energy generate a 

unit of mineral product—has been on 

a downward slope since 2002. According 

to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, 

it now takes 40 percent more 

inputs to dig up minerals in general, 

while the grain sizes and ore grades of 

what’s being retrieved are declining. 

The Journal of Environmental Science 

and Engineering reported in 2013 that, 

“under the present paradigm of use,” 

the world, within decades, will begin 

seeing “scarcity” of “most of the strategically 

important metals and materials 

that are fundamental to [the] 

running of our societies.” According 

to the study’s lead authors, a chemical 

engineering professor at Lund University 

in Sweden and an applied systems 

analyst at Stockholm University, 

“scarcity may lead [to] ‘peak civiliza- 


TOP: BOMBILLAS, 2013; BOTTOM: ALGAS, 2013

tion,’ unless urgent countermeasures 

are systematically undertaken.” 

Even in the midst of substantial 

innovation, today’s global economy 

has become more profligate and more 

wasteful, using more materials per 

unit of GDP than it did 20 years ago. 

According to a 2016 report from the 

International Resource Panel at the 

United Nations Environment Programme, 

the amount of virgin natural 

resource needed for a given amount of 

product has gone up 17 percent over 

a single decade. In 2000, it took an 

average 1.2 kilograms of materials to 

generate one dollar of global GDP. By 

2010, it took 1.4 kilograms. The amount 

of primary materials extracted from 

the Earth globally rose from 22 billion 

tonnes in 1970 to 70 billion tonnes in 

2010, with per capita global material 

use going from seven tonnes in 1970 to 

10 tonnes over the same 40-year period. 

According to the report, there is 

“growing environmental pressure per 

unit of economic activity,” not less. 

Optimists will undoubtedly look to 

renewable energy as a stay against declining 

EROI and rising seas. But they 

may be blindsided by the stark limits of 

wind, solar, and hydro. Researchers at 

Monash University, marshaling considerable 

data, concluded that the cheerful 

scenarios projecting renewables will 

supply most of the world’s energy by 

mid-century “assume unrealistic technical 

potentials and implementation 

times.” Which means we’ll be stuck 

mostly with fossil fuels to keep the expansion 

machine running. Tim Jackson 

of the University of Surrey has calculated 

that, at current rates of carbon 

density—the amount of carbon released 

per unit of energy consumed—our 

greenhouse gas emissions will increase 

by more than 2 percent per year. At 

that rate, by 2050 carbon dioxide emissions 

would be more than double what 

they were in 2015. To achieve a tenfold 

reduction in global emissions by 2050, 

carbon density would have to decline 

on average 8.6 percent annually—almost 

10 times the rate at which it has 

declined over the last 50 years and 50 

times faster than in the past decade. In 

other words, we would have to innovate 

carbon-reduction strategies at rates 

never before seen, with technologies of 

immense effectiveness whose globalscale 

implementation would be entirely 

unprecedented. 

as we blunder along 

with business-as-usual, awaiting the 

techno-messiah promised by the cornucopians 

with their free markets and 

their profit-inspired geniuses, an alternate 

future awaits us. In 2014, Naomi 

Oreskes and Erik Conway, historians of 

science at Harvard and the California 

Institute of Technology, respectively, 

gave us a picture of what that future 

might look like. Together they published 

The Collapse of Western Civilization, 

a grim work of futurist science 

fiction. It was Limits transformed into 

a novella of climate-fueled apocalypse. 

“Suffice it to say that total losses— 

social, cultural, economic, and demographic—were 

greater than any in 

recorded human history,” declares the 

narrator, a historian who lives in a hobbled, 

depopulated society 300 years 

after the “ultimate blow for Western 

civilization.” That blow comes in 2093, 

when breakneck atmospheric warming 

leads to the disintegration of the West 

Antarctica Ice Sheet. This results in 

a sea level rise of five meters or more 

that inundates coastal cities and, combined 

with the effects of other melting 

ice sheets, sends billions of people fleeing 

inland to higher ground. 

The ice sheet meltdown is preceded 

by decades of social and economic unrest 

driven by climate change. In the 

year 2041, for example, a series of “unprecedented 

heat waves” scorches the 

global food supply. In North America, 

desertification that had started in 

the early 21 st century consumes the 

world’s most productive farmland in 

California and the Great Plains. As 

the unrest intensifies the U.S. declares 

martial law, so the good citizens won’t 

GOTA, 2011 


iot, fighting each other for crumbs. 

Governments worldwide are destabilized, 

overthrown. The warmer 

planet, a Petri dish for insects whose 

ranges have expanded, releases upon 

a starved, dehydrated, weakened humanity 

the usual diseases borne by 

flies and mosquitoes—dengue fever, 

yellow fever—and lack of sanitation in 

mass encampments leads to explosive 

outbreaks of those old nemeses, typhus 

and cholera, while there emerge, as 

the future chronicler writes, “viral and 

retroviral agents never before seen.” 

What stuns the future chronicler in 

The Collapse of Western Civilization, 

looking back on this tragic period, 

is that the smartest scientists in the 

world, employing the most advanced 

analytical and technical methods 

available, had charted the trajectory 

toward climate doom long before it 

was a fait accompli. They had warned 

that, if civilization was to survive, it 

had to reduce its pressure on waste 

sinks. “Virtually all agree that the 

people of Western civilization knew 

what was happening to them but were 

unable to stop it,” says the narrator. 

“Indeed, the most startling aspect of 

this story is just how much these people 

knew, and how unable they were 

to act upon what they knew.” 

somber 

context, Limits was not all gloom. Of 

the 12 scenarios it presented, four did 

not end in collapse. Economic and 

ecological stability was possible, the 

researchers found, but only if global 

society engaged in “a deliberate, 

controlled end to growth,” reducing 

industrial output and per-capita 

consumption. Limits described this as 

a “stabilized” world scenario, “a longterm 

equilibrium state” in which “the 

basic material needs of each person 

on Earth are satisfied and each person 

has an equal opportunity to realize 

his individual human potential.” 

Enough stuff to go around, enough 

for everyone to share in a decent life, 

so long as we all agree not to want too 

much. Terrifying notions for those of 

us—by which I mean most of us—who 

are entrenched in the free-market capitalist 

mindset. No wonder it was the 

mainstream economists who mounted 

the strongest attacks on Limits, those 

whose paychecks depend on elite capitalist 

institutions, who construct for 

the public the ideology that rationalizes 

endless growth, who assure that we will 

never need to share our piece of the pie 

if we just keep on growing the pie. 

The driving question behind the 

study was whether global society 

could organize itself to live within 

its means while providing a peaceful, 

equitable existence for its people. By 

asking that question and answering it, 

Limits was dangerous to a social order 

that posits selfishness, greed, and 

envy as the drivers of progress, that 

tells us to hoard for ourselves what we 

can get and ignore the pangs of conscience 

reminding us that the bigger 

pie hasn’t led to a better life for all. 

When the authors of Limits said 

in 1972 that “population and capital 

growth are actually increasing the gap 

between the rich and the poor,” when 

they debunked the myth that more 

growth will lead to human equality, 

they were waving a knife at the neoliberal 

capitalist order. Because what else 

were they talking about in a world with 

no growth and equal opportunity than 

the redistribution of wealth? What 

else were they demanding but a radical 

change in our definition of liberty? 

“Equilibrium,” they wrote, “would require 

trading certain human freedoms, 

such as producing unlimited numbers 

of children or consuming uncontrolled 

amounts of resources, for other freedoms, 

such as relief from pollution and 

crowding and the threat of collapse of 

the world system.” They suggested it 

was a trade-off worth making. But the 

downsizing, the sharing, would have to 

be voluntary. We couldn’t do it under 

conditions of coercion. It would have to 

be, in Dennis Meadows’ words, an “orderly 

and cooperative descent toward a 

socially just sustainability for all.” 

The bottom line, though, is that if 

wealth were divided evenly among 

the nine billion people expected on 

this planet by 2050, the per capita 

material affluence of the global north 

would have to drop significantly. It’s 

doubtful that an entire civilization 

indoctrinated in selfishness would 

bear this without an epic tantrum. It 

would be a process of social maturation 

on a scale never before seen. Because 

in order to retain our humanity 

in the face of limits, we would have to 

confront inequality head on. 

up Meadows to ask 

him what he thought about Limits 

to Growth 44 years after its publication. 

He said that he was optimistic in 

1972. There was time enough to divert 

the ship of too-muchness from its 

collision course with the iceberg. But 

last summer he sounded depressed 

and somewhat cynical. Business-asusual, 

he said, risks a chaotic implosion 

imposed by nature, followed by 

geopolitical turmoil and resource 

wars. This now seemed to be our 

likely path, and it was time, he said, to 

prepare for “system shock.” 

Meadows sees a link between limits 

to growth and what he calls “the authoritarian 

tsunami that is sweeping 

across Western democracies.” He believes 

that global society has already 

entered the phase where the capacity 

to grow, to generate real new wealth, 

is declining. When growth stops, 

tensions mount. “Adapting our institutions, 

population, aspirations, culture, 

norms, and capital to this new 

phase of zero and negative growth,” 

Meadows told me, “will entail many 

decades of change that most people 

will experience as a deterioration of 

order”—and thus as a mandate for 

more-authoritarian government. 

Aldous Huxley predicted this 

eventuality. “There are many roads 

to Brave New World,” he wrote in 

1958. “[B]ut perhaps the straightest 

and the broadest of them is the road 

we are traveling today, the road that 

leads through gigantic numbers and 

accelerating increases.” A planet with 

a population and economy so large it 

produces a permanent civilizational 

emergency, a state of constant crisis, 

is one ripe for “permanent control 

of everybody and everything by the 

agencies of the central government.” 

This would be the ultimate irony of 

the growthist faith, underpinned as 

it is by free-market fundamentalism: 

Only the tyrannical state, with its monopoly 

on violence, its enormous bureaucracies, 

its tentacles reaching into 

every facet of life, will have the power 

to save us from the stupidity that we 

called the freedom to grow forever. 

•CHRISTOPHER KETCHAM is a freelance 

writer. He is writing a book about 

the public lands of the American West. 


AN UPSTAIRS office at New York’s Morgan 

Library, John McQuillen, assistant 

curator of printed books, pulled a large, 

thick tome off a standard gray library 

cart and laid it in a foam book cradle 

the way a mother might lay a baby on 

a bed. The volume was bound in giltembossed 

leather and had metal clasps 

on the fore-edge. On the foot-edge, the 

vellum pages were irregularly wavy, 

betraying their sheepskin roots. 

McQuillen spends his days handling 

extremely rare and valuable books. But 

even he had a reverent air as he opened 

the volume, revealing two blocks of 

right-justified Latin in jet-black Textura 

font, surrounded by a tracery 

of elaborate and colorful scrollwork 

inked in by hand. Across from McQuillen, 

artist Jenifer Wightman bounced 

up and down on her toes with glee. This 

book—the Gutenberg Bible, the first 

notable book that was mass-produced 

using moveable type—was the reason 

Wightman had come to the Morgan. 

She had a few amendments for it. 

There are 48 reasonably intact 

Gutenberg Bibles known in the world, 

20 of which are complete copies that 

include both volumes, the Old and 

New Testaments. The original print 

run—scholars think it was around 

180 copies—is usually dated to 1455. 

Today they are some of the most valuable 

books in the world. In 2015, eight 

pages of a Gutenberg sold at Sotheby’s 

for nearly a million dollars. Even incomplete 

Gutenbergs are kept under 

lock and key, and, in most cases, you 

need a very good reason to be allowed 

to look at one. 

The Morgan Library owns three 

Gutenberg Bibles, more than any other 

institution on Earth, and McQuillen 

had brought two of them out for 

Wightman. It was a thrilling moment. 

Wightman slid a single sheet of handmade 

cotton-and-flax paper from a 

large envelope. It contained four drawings 

and a single block of type 42 lines 

long—the same format as the Gutenberg—comprising 

an addendum to the 

book of Genesis that reinterprets the 

story of Adam and Eve using evolutionary 

and contemporary science. Mc- 

Quillen held up the broadside next to 

the open Bible on the desk. Wightman 

took several photographs. She was one 

step closer to achieving her mission: 

adding her addendum to every known 

Gutenberg Bible in the world. 

Wightman has been offering to 

donate the broadside and hand deliver 

it to every institution that owns 

a Gutenberg. The review process 

that ensues can be lengthy and trying. 

Many libraries have accepted 

the addendum, but did not bring out 

their Bible for her to see. At least one 

wouldn’t even let her inside the building. 

But with the Morgan acquisition 

of three broadsides, she had delivered 

addenda to 39 of the 48 extant Gutenberg 

Bibles. That’s right: For the last 

two years, while #teachevolution 

ricocheted harmlessly through the 

digital echo-chamber, Wightman has 

been using the master’s font to footnote 

the master text, convincing the 

most august libraries on the planet, 

including the Vatican’s own Apostolic 

Library, to add a page of Darwinian 

science to Christianity’s origin of the 

species. Were it packaged as an app or 

a Twitter feed, you might call her project 

disruptive. But because it’s print— 

hand-printed letterpress no less—it is 

somehow even more subversive. 

ohannes Gutenberg 

designed and 

printed a number of 

books, but his masterpiece 

is known 

to book geeks as the 

B42, for its 42 lines of text per page. 

B42s are celebrated for their rarity—exactly 

the opposite of what made 

them world-shattering. The Gutenberg 

Bible wasn’t the first printed book 

(though it is often mistaken as such). 

Nor was Gutenberg the inventor of the 

printed page. By the 1400s, print had 

been around for hundreds of years in 

China, Korea, and Japan. And moveable 

type had been experimented with 

by others, but Gutenberg perfected 

it, making the mass reproduction of 

books possible. It’s generally accepted 

that this launched a revolution. Print 

disrupted the entrenched hierarchies 

of the world. Priests were no longer 

the keepers of the Word. Monarchs 

could be held accountable when laws 

could be cheaply reproduced. Governments 

were more easily changed 

in a world where news disseminated 

quickly. Scholars and scientists could 

build on previous knowledge, giving 

rise to modern history, mathematics, 

philosophy, and the physical sciences. 

Print not only helped knowledge 

grow, but made it more democratic. 

Literacy became more widespread and 

learning more accessible. Cases have 

been made for crediting print, at least 

in part, with the Protestant Reformation, 

the emergence of capitalism, the 

rise of universal suffrage, and the scientific 

revolution. Once print culture 

took hold, knowledge spread more 

easily through a process of dissemination, 

incorporation, iteration. Charles 

Darwin very logically proposed that 

life forms evolve in the same way. 

eni Wightman is a 

wiry woman with a 

cricket-like intensity 

and an almost 

runic conversational 

style. In addition 

to being an artist, she works as a research 

specialist in greenhouse-gas 

accounting at Cornell University. She 

came up with the images for her addendum 

by surveying the entire faculty 

of Cornell about which graphic 

representation of a scientific concept 

they had found most life-changing. 

She chose four of those drawings to 

represent the main symbols in Genesis. 

The Tree of Life is explained as the 

phylogenetic branching diagram that 

shows the evolutionary connectedness 

of all biological species. The creation 

of Eve from Adam’s rib she declares a 

metaphor for mitosis, or cell division. 


The apple stands for ion channels, the 

proteins in our cell walls that charge 

neurons to carry signals, helping to 

build the biological infrastructure for 

knowledge. The snake is DNA. 

“I took poetic license with the 

snake,” Wightman confessed. 

She devised the broadside, officially 

titled Genesis Addendum: Original 

Syn Thesis, during a residency at the 

Center for Book Arts in New York. 

Drafting the addendum was only the 

first part of the project. Printing it 

in a letterpress format that matched 

that of the B42 was the second part. It 

was a long and painstaking effort. But 

the real heart of the project is getting 

those addenda into libraries—catalogued 

and archived in association 

with the book that started it all. 

“I’m not addending all Bibles; I’m addending 

Gutenberg Bibles,” Wightman 

explained at the New York Public Library’s 

main branch, five blocks north 

of the Morgan. In other words, her project 

is not only about adding evolution 

to the creation story; it’s about showing 

how the scientific revolution itself was 

dependent on the revolution of print. 

She was at the NYPL to deliver an 

addendum to the first Gutenberg to 

be brought to the United States. The 

copy had been purchased in 1847 

by businessman and philanthropist 

James Lenox, one of the library’s 

founders. Library lore holds that the 

workers in the customs house were 

made to remove their hats to show respect 

for the book upon seeing it. Yet 

Lenox’s book buyer, Henry Stevens, in 

his gossipy 1886 memoir, relates that 

Lenox was initially so appalled at the 

$3,000 his agent had doled out for the 

Bible that he refused to clear the book 

through customs. It was only after “a 

good deal of correspondence” that 

Lenox “took home the book, and soon 

learned to cherish it as a bargain and 

the chief ornament of his library.” 

When Wightman visited, Lenox’s 

chief ornament was lounging in an 

acrylic cube in the NYPL’s McGraw 

Rotunda. (Normally it lives in the 

Main Reading Room, but that room 

was undergoing restoration.) She had 

to wait for a group of Chinese tourists 

to finish taking selfies with the Bible 

before snapping a photo of her own. 

The McGraw Rotunda features a set 

of four murals collectively called The 

Story of the Recorded Word: Moses 

delivering the Ten Commandments; a 

medieval scribe copying a manuscript; 

Gutenberg before his press displaying 

a proof page of his Bible; and a newspaper 

editor reading pages fresh off a 

Linotype machine. It feels as if there’s 

something missing in this progression. 

Larry Page and Sergey Brin writing 

code in a garage? Ben Kovitz explaining 

the concept of a wiki to Jimmy 

Wales? The upload of Grumpy Cat’s 

first video? The next frame in this sequence 

is surely digital. But in an era of 

fake news, “fake” real news, and truthiness, 

it seems crucial to ask: Does each 

communication revolution necessarily 

supplant the one that came before? 

utenberg’s name is 

nearly always paired 

with the Bible—and 

this shapes our feelings 

about his print 

revolution, making 

it seem stolid, even orthodox. But the 

Bible was not the first thing Gutenberg 

printed. His first book was a Latin 

grammar for schoolboys, Ars Minor by 

Aelius Donatus. Around the time of the 

B42, Gutenberg was also printing certificates 

used to sell plenary indulgences, 

a calendar filled with inflammatory, 

anti-Muslim doggerel inciting war with 

the Turks, and a New Age-y mystical 

poem from the Sibylline Prophecies. In 

fact, it took a while for the print revolution 

to move into the sphere of reason; 

for the first few decades, what churned 

off the presses was mostly astrology, 

alchemy, and good old soft porn. The 

age of Gutenberg, it seems, was a lot 

like the age of YouTube. 

Today, however, the pop culture that 

print spawned views print as a relic, an 

outmoded technology that shaped an 

outdated world. Even the name Gutenberg 

is used to evoke his own obsolescence, 

as in Sven Birkerts’ gloomy The 

Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading 

in an Electronic Age. Marshall McLuhan 

launched this trend pre-Internet 

with 1962’s The Gutenberg Galaxy: 

The Making of Typographic Man. The 

book argued that moveable type had 

remade culture for the worse, increasing 

human alienation by privileging 

the visual, the rational, and the standardized 

over the more freewheeling, 

one-to-one oral culture that preceded 

it. McLuhan and followers, like his 

student Walter Ong, claimed that print 

was quickly succumbing to “secondary 

orality”—by which they meant radio 

and television—making culture once 

again more immediate, participatory, 

and ecstatic. 

That sort of happened, and sort of 

didn’t. The electronic age killed off 

some things, like popular magazine 

fiction. People stopped discussing 

novels around the water cooler and 

started discussing shows on NBC or 

HBO around the microwave. Today 

that discussion has evolved into 

tweeting about shows on Amazon. 

But radio and TV did not terminate 

print, or the book. Nevertheless, the 

same argument is now made about 

the Internet. Print’s demise at the 

hands of tech has been bemoaned 

frequently enough to garner an Onion 

headline: “Print Dead at 1,803.” 

People in the tech world reheated 

and reserved the argument a few years 

back with the concept of the Gutenberg 

Parenthesis. Proponents claimed 

that books “imprisoned” words, and 

that print culture created the expectation 

of stable, original, authoritative 

texts. Print thus gave rise to rigid, 

category-based thinking: You could 

blame it for racism, sexism, and class 

immobility. The oral culture that preceded 

the parenthesis, and the digital 

culture now succeeding it, free texts— 

and humans—from the prison-house 

of printed language, they say. 

Of course, this supposedly parenthetical 

era of entrapment saw the 

French and American revolutions, 

the freeing of Russia’s serfs, the end 

of the slave trade, and the dawn of 

civil rights and women’s rights and 

LGBTQ rights. That’s a lot of freedom 

and justice being aided and abetted by 

the allegedly repressive technology of 

print. But the bigger problem with the 

parenthesis concept is the idea that 

texts remain rigid, while oral and digital 

expressions are malleable and free. 

Print standardized texts, but it 

didn’t make them less interactive. It 

made them more so. Once books were 

mass-produced, it became a more 

trivial thing to illustrate, bind, or 

rebind them. The title letters of the 

B42 itself were left blank so people 

could have them rubricated—colored 

in—themselves. Books were easily 

written on, torn up, even burned. The 

Gutenberg revolution, no less than 


the digital one, encouraged a culture 

of revision—and also one of sampling, 

sharing, reworking, and theft. 

It’s tempting to look wistfully 

backwards at print as a guarantor of 

authority, or at least of truth. In the 

days of hometown newspapers, we 

all agreed on at least a few tenets of 

objective reality. But when a Balkanbrewed 

conspiracy theory or a baseless 

claim via tweet can circulate the 

planet and flash in front of millions of 

eyeballs before being refuted, when 

there are facts and “alternative facts,” 

reality itself is under siege. 

This situation is worthy of consideration—but 

it has nothing to do with 

print versus digital. To see printed 

texts as rigid prison-houses while seeing 

digital and oral communication as 

orgies of multivalence is to mistake 

the forest fire for the trees. In fact, the 

more authoritative a book is, the more 

subject it is to endless re-reading and 

re-interpretation. Case in point: the 

Bible. All the printing press really did 

was unleash the disruptive potential of 

the word. Any technology that enabled 

quick and easy reproductions of text 

would have led to the dissemination 

and popularization of radical ideas like 

democracy, equality, and individual 

freedom. Had Gutenberg invented 

the World Wide Web instead of moveable 

type, or trained pigeons to tap 

out books with their beaks, the results 

would have been much the same: Martin 

Luther, Galileo, Charles Darwin, 

Karl Marx, Steve Jobs. By now, Ray 

Kurzweil would be assuring us the pigeons 

were becoming self-aware. 

hat print doomsayers 

tend to miss 

is the very thing 

Wightman’s project 

cleverly demonstrates: 

The revolution 

is not simply about the medium, 

or the message. It’s also about the 

matrix. Gutenberg Bibles exist inside 

a larger apparatus that was also 

transformed by print: the apparatus 

of the library. The library is not simply 

storage for books, but a storehouse for 

knowledge. A searchable storehouse— 

a kind of analog Internet. Its custodians 

are curators, archivists, and librarians, 

some of whom were suspicious of 

Wightman’s project, especially in the 

beginning. (Libraries don’t just accept 

and catalog any old thing.) For her first 

donation, in 2014, at the Bayerische 

Staatsbibliothek in Munich, Wightman 

was handed off to three different 

curators before she convinced one to 

accept the addendum. 

“I think they all thought I was a nut 

job,” she said. She finds the process of 

cold-calling somewhat stressful. “It 

wasn’t until the eighth or 10th delivery 

that it started to be fun.” 

That’s because libraries, unlike the 

Internet, have gatekeepers. Still, almost 

every library she has approached 

has accepted the donation. The library’s 

mission, after all, is to accumulate 

information; its own logic makes 

addenda its goal. Even the Vatican, 

where Wightman feared her scientific 

re-interpretation of biblical texts 

might be unwelcome, bowed to the 

prerogative of collection. Ambrogio 

Piazzoni, vice prefect of the Biblioteca 

Apostolica Vaticana, listened with interest 

as Wightman explained her text. 

“He said, ‘So it’s just another creation 

story?’ and I said ‘Yes!’” she 

recalled. The Vatican has two Gutenbergs, 

so she donated two addenda. 

Only one library thus far has refused 

the gift outright: the Bibliothèque 

Nationale de France, which 

owns two Gutenbergs. Requests for 

comment from the bibliothèque 

have thus far received no reply. After 

Wightman’s New York excursions, 

she had delivered 39 addenda. Thirtyfour 

had been formally accepted, two 

rejected, and three were still pending 

review. Libraries that have accepted 

and catalogued Genesis Addendum 

include the Gutenberg Museum in 

Mainz, Germany; the Staatsbibliothek 

zu Berlin; the Royal Library in Denmark; 

the National Library of Scotland; 

the Bodmer Library in Switzerland; 

and the Russian State Library, 

whose copy of the B42 was taken as 

war booty from Germany at the end of 

World War II. Wightman was allowed 

to see that Bible, but not to touch it. 

The amount of access that librarians 

accepting her donation have 

been willing to give her has varied. 

At Cambridge University Library, 

she was allowed to photograph the 

Gutenberg Bible with her Addendum 

literally addending it. At Lomonosov 

Moscow State University she never 

got past the foyer. Some archivists 

THE EVOLUTION OF 

STORYTELLING 

TECHNOLOGY 

BY MORGAN BASKIN 

& JACK DENTON 

CAVE ART 

~35,000 years ago 

The French anthropologist 

Claude Lévi-Strauss argued 

that early human art depicted 

animals “not because they are 

‘good to eat’ but because they 

are ‘good to think.’” 

CUNEIFORM 

~5,000 to 6,000 years ago 

One of the earliest forms 

of written communication, 

cuneiform’s wedge-shaped and 

linear characters developed 

over centuries in ancient 

Mesopotamia, eventually 

becoming sophisticated 

enough to convey fictional and 

non-fictional narratives. Over 

300,000 inscribed clay tablets 

survive to this day. 

LIBRARY 

~3,000 to 5,000 years ago 

By about 3000 B.C.E., carefully 

organized libraries had been 

built to hold hundreds of 

thousands of tablets inscribed 

with government, business, and 

temple records. Hammurabi’s 

Code of Laws, inscribed in tiny 

cuneiform script on a sevenfoot 

basalt stele, details one of 

the most elaborate early law 

systems, including around 30 

different crimes that garnered 

the death penalty. 

ALPHABET 

~2,800 to 3,200 years ago 

Though the Phoenicians 

of present-day Egypt are 

thought to have introduced the 

alphabet concept to the Greeks 

sometime around the eighth 

century B.C.E., the Greek 

alphabet was more advanced, 

and was written with a more 

cursive flourish. Scholars 

credit the innovation—using 

a consistent set of shapes 

that can be combined and 

rearranged into different 

words—with democratizing 

knowledge, a revolution on par 

with the printing press. 

PRINTING PRESS 

1440s 

In the half-century following 

Johannes Gutenberg’s 

invention, 10 million books 


were printed, and the price 

of a book fell by two-thirds. 

Industrial-scale printing united 

once-disparate academic 

disciplines, turning the print 

shop into a cultural center. 

Centuries later, myths swirled 

that Johann Fust, financier 

for Gutenberg’s original press, 

had been working for the 

devil, probably a consequence 

of the similarities between 

his surname and that of the 

blasphemous and morally 

bankrupt Dr. Faust from 

German lore. 

TYPEWRITER 

1714 

Although a commercially 

successful typewriter wasn’t 

created until the early 1870s, 

in 1714 an Englishman named 

Henry Mill received a patent 

for a machine capable of the 

“impressing or transcribing of 

letters, one after another, as in 

writing.” Several early “writing 

machine” prototypes were 

created to help the blind write. 

MOVING PICTURES 

1878 

In 1878, the British photographer 

Eadweard Muybridge captured 

a series of photographs of a 

galloping racehorse to prove 

that all of a horse’s hooves 

are simultaneously aloft midgallop. 

He then projected the 

images onto a screen in quick 

succession with a device he 

called a zoopraxiscope, which, 

in turn, inspired the movingpicture 

camera that Thomas 

Edison’s laboratories developed 

a decade later. 

TELEVISION 

1927 

Philo T. Farnsworth, who spent 

much of his childhood on a farm 

without electricity, invented 

the first working electronic 

television in 1927 at the age of 

21. He only once appeared on 

TV—on the quiz show I’ve Got a 

Secret. None of the contestants 

had any idea who he was. 

VIRTUAL REALITY 

1980s 

Virtual reality has been around 

since at least the 1980s, and 

the U.S. military has utilized 

it for combat simulation for 

nearly as long. Recently, it has 

been used—with preliminary 

success—to help treat posttraumatic 

stress disorder. The 

market for consumer-side 

virtual- and augmented-reality 

video games and mentalhealth 

services is expected to 

reach $162 billion by 2020. 

have brought out favorite treasured 

books for her to see. At the National 

Library of Scotland, curators showed 

her the Bassandyne Bible, the first 

to be printed in Scotland. At the Library 

of Congress, she was shown the 

first Bible printed in the U.S., a version 

translated into phonetic Natick 

dialect for missionary use. When, in 

2011, Tea Party Congressman Robert 

Aderholt (R-Alabama) asked to be 

sworn in using the first Bible printed 

in the nation, he may or may not have 

been looking to rest his hand on an 

instrument of colonialist oppression. 

Or perhaps he intended to signify 

something else entirely. Books, after 

all, have many meanings, far more 

than mere text can contain. 

utenberg’s revolution 

was not really 

about a book. It was 

not even about 

books. It was about 

accessibility. And 

looked at that way, the digital revolution 

does not supplant print’s project: 

It completes it. If you Google “Gutenberg,” 

the first result is Project Gutenberg, 

which offers free downloadable 

e-books. Columbia University Press 

and the American Historical Association 

have created an online repository 

of enhanced history books called 

Gutenberg-e. And perhaps the most 

disruptive—and controversial—tool 

Google has released to date is Google 

Books, which allows a nearly comprehensive 

catalog of books to be textsearched 

and data-mined, without 

compensating authors or publishers. 

Librarians don’t care primarily 

about ink on paper or images on microform 

or bytes on disks or digidrops 

in the cloud. They care about archiving, 

so that citizens, present and 

future, can access vast stores of ideas, 

and they will use whatever tools serve 

that end. Ironically, one of the most 

frequent modes of preserving digital 

documents is to print them out and 

catalog them. Paper and microform 

currently have longer shelf lives than 

rapidly changing digital formats like 

floppy disks or CD-ROMs or USB 

drives—and they don’t require special 

playback technologies. As for the 

cloud, the special vulnerability of 

that digital archive was potently illustrated 

by the spectacle of scientists 

scrambling madly to copy the entire 

federal repository of climate data before 

the incoming Trump administration 

gained the power to delete it. 

n the day Donald 

Trump took office, 

Wightman skirted 

messages chalked 

in rainbow colors 

on the sidewalks of 

Yale University: “Engage with others”; 

“I have a dream”; “Great again 

for all.” She had an appointment with 

Ray Clemens, of Yale’s Beinecke Rare 

Book & Manuscript Library, who had 

taken its Gutenberg Old Testament 

from its display case and laid it on a 

foam cradle in a classroom. Yale’s B42 

is not as gorgeous as the one at Princeton 

University’s Scheide Library, 

which Wightman had addended the 

day before. Princeton’s copy boasts its 

original embossed-calfskin binding; 

Yale’s has a worn, unremarkable binding, 

and its pages were trimmed at 

some point, guillotining off the wavy 

edges and some of its hand-rubrication. 

But Clemens was still excited to 

share it, even welcoming some visiting 

high school students, who took a 

group selfie with it. Wightman and 

Clemens paged through the Bible for 

about an hour. Then Wightman left, 

having delivered 41 of 49 addenda. 

Between them, Yale and Princeton 

have graduated seven American 

presidents. Jeni Wightman’s project 

won’t guarantee that science is taught 

objectively in all schools, or that nonalternative 

facts will triumph over 

alternative ones. But it does help us 

understand how ideas replicate, how 

culture creates structures for the 

transmission and preservation and 

evolution of knowledge and truth. 

How one particular story is never the 

end of the story. It reminds us that 

print was not the real revolution. The 

real revolution was language itself, a 

virus, or its own kind of DNA, a way 

of encoding and replicating content 

separate from the content itself. In 

the beginning was the word. 

•GINGER STRAND’s most recent 

book is The Brothers Vonnegut: Science 

and Fiction in the House of Magic. 

@GINGERSTRAND 


THE 

CULTURE 

PAGES 

WHERE 

CULTURE MEETS 

CONSCIENCE 

A Library as 

Large as Africa 

The Jalada literary collective has a radical 

mission: an ongoing translation effort to unite— 

and elevate—African literature. 

BY AARON BADY 

IT BEGAN WITH a workshop 

for young writers in 

Nairobi in 2013, organized 

by the Kwani Trust and 

the British Council. As Moses Kilolo 

recalls, he had never attended a writing 

workshop before. Like so many of 

his peers, he had been toiling alone: 

Each day he would haunt his university 

library, struggling in his own writing 

to imitate the English-language 

classics that he found on the shelves. 

It was a remarkably well-stocked library, 

as he remembers it, the best a 

young writer could hope for. Yet while 

he had produced a few halting efforts 

at prose, he hadn’t yet “come out” as a 

writer. He stayed in the stacks. It was 

only after the three-day workshop 

with a dozen other young writers, he 

says, that the brilliance of his peers 

pulled him out of the library—helped 

him to realize what he could never 

accomplish alone. “I wasn’t as good as 


PHOTOS BY JERRY RILEY

I thought,” he laughs. “They tore my 

work apart! It was moving to know 

that there’s so much more possibility.” 

The feeling was general among the 

workshop’s participants. At first they 

stayed in touch out of a spontaneous 

desire to keep the conversations 

going. But after Okwiri Oduor—who 

would win the Caine Prize for African 

Writing later in the year—set up 

a Google group named Jalada, after 

the word for library in Kiswahili, the 

group began to evolve into something 

more concrete. As the members began 

writing, and editing each other’s 

work, they also began talking about 

what hadn’t been written yet, and 

what needed to be. They began building 

their own library: A few months 

after the workshop, they set up a barebones 

website ( jalada.org) where they 

published an anthology of original 

work loosely themed around the notion 

of insanity, Sketch of a Bald Woman 

in the Semi-Nude and Other Stories. 

It had been an easy choice to publish 

on the Internet: It was free, it 

was easy, and they had complete control. 

As the word spread—and as the 

inaugural anthology did the rounds 

on social media—they began hearing 

from writers across the continent, 

asking if they could submit to the 

next anthology. Jalada’s editors said 

yes. The second collection—Sext Me: 

Poems and Stories, on the intersections 

of sex and technology, and twice 

as long as the first—included a handful 

of participants from outside Kenya, 

as well as Jalada’s first official call 

for submissions. Exactly a year after 

the first anthology, Afrofuture(s)—a 

three-part shelf-buster of Africanist 

speculative fiction—had close to a majority 

of non-Kenyan writers. 

As the library has grown from a 

roomful of young Nairobians to an 

ongoing conversation that spans 

the continent—with email, Skype, 

and social media allowing members 

in a half-dozen countries to stay in 

touch—it’s become clear that Jalada is 

where the future of African literature 

is being written. A project with a pan- 

Africanist scope might have drowned 

under the logistics of communication 

and distance, or lost its energy in 

fundraising. Instead, meetings have 

yielded true mentorships and editorial 

relationships, and correspondences 

have blossomed into longterm 

collaborations, as the contributors 

to each anthology have become 

a part of the broader network. The 

management team remains mostly 

Kenyan—allowing semi-regular faceto-face 

meetings—but the structure 

is as horizontal and outward-looking 

as possible. Members from Namibia, 

Nigeria, Zimbabwe, South Africa, and 

Somalia make up the core group, with 

an even broader network of contributors 

and collaborators. Richard Ali 

in Nigeria and Edwige-Renée DRO 

in Côte d’Ivoire have been crucial 

to the project’s expanding reach, for 

example, both for their editorial expertise 

and for connecting Jalada to 

new writers in West and Francophone 

Africa. Building connections with 

North Africa is the next hurdle. 

Jalada’s “about” page is brief and to 

the point: a “pan-Africanist writers’ 

collective” whose goal is “to publish 

literature by African authors regularly 

by making it as easy as possible 

for any member to publish anything.” 

This tautology—their goal is to 

publish the things they are publishing—tells 

a story of its own: Jalada is 

just the work itself, without money, 

pretensions, or ego. The anthologies 

don’t have introductions, nor are 

there mission statements or manifestos; 

there is only the writing. 

As with anything new and experimental, 

the quality of the writing is 

uneven: Sometimes raw and incandescent, 

it’s as likely to be interestingly 

incoherent as heart-stoppingly 

precise. But the collective is bigger 

than the sum of its parts, and the 

project’s ambitions are transformative. 

By self-publishing online—and 

by working in a spirit of collective 

collaboration—Jalada’s themes in its 

first year of existence form a checklist 

of the topics that someone like Moses 

Kilolo might struggle to find on the 

shelves of a Nairobi library: insan- 

and the future. 

ity, sex, technology, 

Because a top-heavy pantheon of 

(mostly male) writers 

from the 1960s 

and ’70s has dominated African literary 

publishing for decades, African 

literature has often been backwardlooking 

and history-oriented. Jalada 

made a clean break, even establishing 

a commitment to gender parity from 

the beginning. (Original contributor 

Anne Moraa was blasé when I asked 

her about this: “If you are open to the 

best work, you will achieve gender 

parity by default,” she said, though 

she also gave credit to the original 

workshop for being gender balanced.) 

In 2015, Jalada began its most 

ambitious project yet: to go beyond 

the handful of colonial languages in 

which most African writers write— 

English, French, Portuguese, and 

Arabic—and explore the thousands of 

mother tongues that the vast majority 

of the continent’s people speak. With 

more than 3,000 languages spoken 

by significant populations, Africa’s 

everyday polylingualism defies most 

Western understanding. In Kenya, 

for example, it’s common to speak 

one language in the streets, another 

in school, and another in the family 

home (Swahili, English, and an 

ethnic or tribal language like Kamba, 

Kikuyu, or Luo). But exceptions 

outweigh even this very rough norm; 

Nairobi urbanites might speak Sheng 

more than either Swahili or English 

(the languages of which it is a patois), 

while interethnic families tend to 

speak multiple languages. Anywhere 

you find immigrant communities 

(which is everywhere), the linguistic 

cocktail gets mixed in yet other ways. 

The only generalization one can 

venture is this: If there’s one thing that 

unites Africa—that nearly all Africans 

have in common—it’s the same polylingualism 

that divides it, an irony that 

has haunted African literature since 

its beginnings. It has taken a project 

like Jalada to do something about it. 

BEFORE COLONIZATION and the imposition 

of European languages, the 

continent’s poetics were oral, dis- 



persed across Ewe, Shona, Kiswahili, 

Luganda, Igbo, and thousands of other 

languages. When African literature began 

to be written, published, and read 

in the early part of the 20 th century, it 

was in the context of imperialist globalization, 

a Pan-Africanism that was 

invariably expressed in the languages 

of the colonizers. Indeed, English, 

French, Portuguese, and Arabic provided 

the literary infrastructure that 

brought writers and readers across 

Africa into contact with each other, 

sometimes for the first time in history: 

Nigerians could read Kenyans in English, 

Ivorians could read Mauritanians 

in French, and novels by Tayeb Salih of 

Sudan (in Arabic) or Pepetela of Angola 

(Portuguese) could crisscross the 

continent in translation. But that was 

where it usually stopped; translations 

from African languages were rare (and 

mostly ethnographic), while translations 

between African languages were 

almost non-existent. 

For most African writers, then and 

now, the languages of the former colonizers 

have been the only pragmatic 

choice. Faced with a nation speaking 

over 300 languages, for example, Chinua 

Achebe wrote in English, the only 

language most Nigerians shared. Rare 

exceptions prove the rule: When Ngugi 

wa Thiong’o vowed to write only 

in his native Gikuyu, in the 1970s, 

his polemic made waves but few converts. 

His manifesto, Decolonizing the 

Mind, has been debated and fought 

over for decades and remains a lightning 

rod for controversy in African 

literary circles. But the cruel irony is 

that most still read him in English. 

Without a strong Gikuyu publishing 

industry—in a country where Gikuyu 

speakers make up around 20 percent 

of the population—even Ngugi’s main 

Kenyan audience will always read 

him in English translation. 

In 2015, Jalada published an anthology 

of original stories and poems both 

in the authors’ own respective languages 

(many of which were African) 

and in a variety of translations. Kilolo’s 

“An Empty Wall,” for example, is presented 

both in English and in Junior 

Moyo’s Ndebele translation (a language 

spoken in Zimbabwe). Edwige- 

Renée DRO wrote “Pneu Secours” in 

French and translated it into English 

herself, while Mazhun Idris made the 

translation into Hausa (spoken in 

northern Nigeria). But this was just 

a prelude to the group’s most striking 

translation project: In the next 

anthology, they took a story donated 

by Ngugi wa Thiong’o (“Ituika Ria 

Murungaru” in Kikuyu, “The Upright 

Revolution” in English) and translated 

it into 62 languages (and counting). 

While the accomplishment is remarkable, 

of course, the anthology 

can’t really be read in the conventional 

manner at all: Few can read 

Ngugi’s folkloric parable about why 

humans walk upright in more than a 

handful of the languages that the anthology 

offers. Rather, the point is to 

imagine a different kind of library. “At 

a personal level, what Jalada has done 

is akin to recapturing stolen lands,” as 

founding editor Richard Oduor Oduku 

told me. “We have recaptured the 

authority to imagine our own futures, 

including what languages we will, or 

we can, employ.” This sentiment was 

general among the translators I spoke 

with; Rwandan Louise Umutoni, for 

example, described translation into 

European languages as a kind of brain 

drain, and explained that, instead of 

Africa’s literary resources enriching 

languages like English, Jalada reversed 

the flow, translating European 

works into African languages starved 

for the written literary word. 

In November, Jalada staged a reading 

of the story in Nairobi, in seven 

languages: Sheng, Kiswahili, Dholuo, 

Kikuyu, Kiluhya, Kinyarwanda, and 

English. Few in the audience would 

have been fluent in more than a few 

of them. But, as Kilolo recalled, the 

revelation was seeing seven different 

languages in the same place, before 

the same audience, uniting rather 

than dividing. “People were thrilled 

to see so many languages at once,” he 

said. “We have to do away with the 

notion that speaking a different language 

divides people.” 

•AARON BADY is a writer in Oakland 

and an editor at The New Inquiry. 

@ZUNGUZUNGU 

Pacific 

Standard 

Picks 

BY KRISTINA KUTATELI 

TWITTER AND TEAR GAS 

Thanks to social media, 

launching a global 

movement is now as simple 

as pressing send. In modern 

movements, the Internet 

has mobilized hundreds of 

thousands of protesters and 

organized vital aid. But how 

effective are Twitter and 

Facebook, really? A new 

book by Zeynep Tufekci 

promises to provide some 

answers. Incorporating a 

decade’s experience spent 

studying social movements, 

Tufekci outlines how new 

networked protests form. 

Using social theory and onthe-ground 

analysis, Tufekci 

finds that the outcomes 

of 21 st -century movements 

like Occupy Wall Street 

aren’t proportional to the 

energy they inspire on 

social media—spreading the 

message across easy-toaccess, 

fast-moving apps 

doesn’t necessarily lead 

to lasting social change. 

Still, Tufekci doesn’t 

dismiss the power of 

networked protest. Twitter, 

she ultimately concedes, 

may influence citizens’ 

perceptions of their state’s 

legitimacy more than world 

leaders may think. 

FOR MORE SELECTIONS FROM 

OUR CULTURE WRITERS AND 

EDITORS, VISIT PSMAG.COM. 


WHERE CULTURE MEETS CONSCIENCE 

The Refugees’ Theater 

As the population of displaced Syrians swells in 

Germany, one storytelling series aims to expedite 

integration through first-person narrative. 

ON AN EMPTY STAGE, Ahmad Kalaji 

re-enacts the footsteps that took him 

from his house to the local shop where 

he used to buy cigarettes in Syria: 46 

steps there, 32 on the way back. One 

day his path to the shop was interrupted. 

Kalaji was just six steps away 

when he saw two men with guns—a 

new military checkpoint. Syria’s 

civil war, a vicious conflict sparked by 

President Bashar al-Assad’s violent 

repression of the 2011 Arab uprisings, 

had reached his neighborhood. 

Over the days that followed, the 

checkpoint mushroomed. “Now there 

are many soldiers,” Kalaji tells the audience. 

“Cement walls. Wires. A steel 

gate.” Eventually, he stopped counting 

his steps. His story slips from past 

to present: That’s why he later moved 

here, to Berlin, he says. 

Kalaji, expressive by nature, told 

his story as part of Storytelling 

Arena’s Syrian Series, a Berlin-based 

program of live narrative events run 

by Scottish theater producer Rachel 

Clarke. Stories are written and read 

by the city’s refugee community, 

though, as Kalaji speaks, light shines 

on the silent audience as well. With 

BY MORGAN MEAKER 

this, the production hints at a larger 

message: that success of the country’s 

“welcome culture”—a phrase 

that embodies Germany’s open-door 

policy—is not only the responsibility 

of its refugees, but also of its locals. 

In 2016, Germany suffered three 

terror attacks. Each incident has 

fueled concerns that migrants introduce 

greater instability into society. 

Throughout the Syrian crisis, Chancellor 

Angela Merkel has called for 

tolerance—for Germany to stand by 

its humanitarian values. But a December 

speech marked a shift to the 

political right. Merkel said that the 

full-face veil should be “forbidden 

wherever legally possible,” calling for 

the country’s migrant population to 

adopt a German “way of life.” 

Jenny Phillimore, a British expert 

on migrant integration, explains this 

approach as assimilation, a system 

where migrants are expected to 

“become just like us.” The alternative, 

Phillimore says, is integration, 

“where there is an expectation that 

the host population will adapt to the 

new levels of diversity, and the migrant 

population will adapt as well.” 

Although the European Union clearly 

defines the process of integration as 

“a dynamic, two-way process,” national 

governments across the bloc 

regularly use the word to refer to assimilationist 

policies. 

At each Storytelling Arena event, 

the audience is a mixture of Germans 

and Syrians, representing the new 

fabric of Berlin. Throughout the 

shows, the two nationalities reveal 

their similarities but also their differences—they 

speak different languages, 

laugh at different jokes, and clap at 

different points in the music. 

The events are multi-lingual. Stories 

are usually told in Arabic translated 

into German or English. (Kalaji’s 

was told only in English.) 

In 2016, a group of leading German 

social scientists surveyed over 5,000 

Germans about their exposure to and 

attitudes toward new arrivals. Despite 

a national climate of intense controversy 

around immigration issues, they 

found that native Germans who had 

more interactions with migrants were 

more optimistic about co-existence— 

echoing decades of research that also 

found a relationship between tolerance 

and exposure to diversity. 

Kalaji says he hopes storytelling 

helps Berliners feel empathy toward 

refugees; he doesn’t want their sympathy. 

“Empathy comes from the 

heart,” he says, explaining the difference. 

“It’s like, if someone was in 

a dark hole, you would go down and 

stay with the person and be in his 

shoes. Sympathy is just looking down 

the hole to tell the person: ‘It’s dark 

down there. Hang on.’” 

Back in the Berlin theater, it’s time 

for the intermission. But Kalaji’s descriptions 

of his quiet Syrian neighborhood 

are still present: Conversations 

are stuck on the stories just told as 

theatergoers intermingle. “After the 

performance, everyone talks together—they 

get to know each other,” storyteller 

Firas Al Younis says. After the 

performance, the Syrian tale is also no 

longer just a headline. It feels human. 

•MORGAN MEAKER is a human-rights 

journalist covering Europe and the 

MENA region. @MORGANMEAKER 

PHOTO COURTESY OF STORYTELLING ARENA 



Standing Up 

for Transgender 

Acceptance 

In their California comedy 

show, couple Robin Tran and 

Cate Gary share their complex 

love story—and normalize 

comedy about gender 

transitions in the process. 

BY JENNIFER PURDIE 

ON A SUNDAY NIGHT in Los Angeles, 

the audience at Tao Comedy Studio, a 

quaint, New Age-y performance space 

four blocks south of swanky Melrose Avenue, 

snaps to attention. An Asian woman 

wearing a knee-length black dress 

and red sweater has taken the stage 

beneath a hanging yin-yang charm; she 

removes the microphone and places its 

stand behind her. “My name is Robin 

Tran. I’m transgender, and that’s a coincidence. 

A lot of people think I transitioned 

for one pun. Can you believe 

that?” She lands her set’s first laugh. 

Tran’s material—ranging from her 

appearance as a transgender woman 

to grocery shopping—is memorable, 

as was the opening act: Tran was 

preceded by her girlfriend, Cate 

Gary, a redhead with a stark, cropped 

haircut who joked about religiousfanatic 

groups that think transgender 

people are making their identities up. 

(“Seems like a dangerous road for religious 

people to choose.”) After both 

Gary and Tran finish their individual 

sets, an assistant places a second microphone 

stand on the stage and they 

begin a side-by-side routine that tells 

an untraditional love story. 

Their duo act, “Unconventional Lesbians,” 

which Tran and Gary have performed 

at 90-minute shows like this 

one since October of 2015, starts with 

an anecdote about how they met. Tran 

first encountered Gary at an open mic 

in April of 2012, before she came out as 

transgender. When they began seeing 

each other at stand-up events around 

Orange County, they flirted, but only 

onstage. Six months into their acquaintance 

Tran asked Gary out. Gary 

was reluctant at first, mentioning she’s 

“very damaged” and a “life-ruiner.” 

Gary adjusts the microphone as 

she describes dating Robert—Robin’s 

birth name. Tran struggled to feel 

like the man in the relationship. She 

headed to the gym to make herself 

look and feel bigger than Gary; she 

often asked, “Am I man enough for 

you?” At home, their relationship was 

sometimes tense, Gary says. “I asked 

her, do you love me as much as you 

hate yourself?” Gary shakes her head 

no, giving the audience Tran’s answer. 

The scales were tipped when Robin 

came out in 2015, two years into their 

relationship. How she relayed that 

insight to her girlfriend forms the 

vignette’s punch line: “Like how any 

good boyfriend comes out to her girlfriend, 

I Facebook messaged her.” 

“No more work got done that day,” 

Gary retorts, her voice getting a notch 

louder than Tran’s. 

The show ultimately has a happy 

ending: Gary and Tran decided to stay 

together, and they began performing 

“Unconventional Lesbians” eight 

months after Tran officially came out 

to Gary. Most friends responded well 

to both of their life-altering decisions. 

After the show, Gary says, “We could 

finally be ourselves too.” 

Onstage, however, being themselves 

means jockeying for attention at a 

moment when cisgender men are still 

the main commercial players in standup. 

Though transgender comedians 

like Julia Scotti and Ian Harvie have 

become name brands in recent years, 

in the first eight months of 2016, of 58 

comedians who performed stand-up 

sets on late-night television, only 16 

were women. As of this past October, 

only one trans man, Ian Harvie, had 

received a green light to film a standup 

comedy special. “When I first walk 

up on stage, most people are taken 

aback,” Tran says. “Everyone stops 

talking. I would say they are confused 

and amused at the same time.” 

Still, Tran views being a nonconformist 

in comedy as an asset: “I 

get some chuckling before I even say 

something. Standards are low, which 

makes it easy to overcome them.” Gary 

acknowledges that the crowd also helps 

to make “Unconventional Lesbians” a 

success. She says that most attendees 

learn about them on Facebook ahead 

of time, and so they don’t often face 

preconceived, broad judgments about 

transgender people like they might in 

front of a standard comedy audience. 

But the performance seems to erode 

discomfort from the room as well. 

When Gary tells the audience at Tao, 

“We’re a very offensive couple—our existence 

offends people,” she enunciates 

every word for extra emphasis, eliciting 

the night’s loudest laughs. Gary 

is using a time-tested joke-writing 

strategy: Laugh at yourself in a truthful 

way, and the audience feels that it has 

permission to laugh along with you. 

With that, Tran thanks everyone for 

coming, and she and Gary place the 

microphones back into their stands. As 

any good comedian knows, you end the 

show when you get a big last laugh. 

•JENNIFER PURDIE is a writer in 

Southern California. @JENPURDIE 


ILLUSTRATIONS BY ELIAS STEIN


MEMOIR 

Just Mercy 

Lawyer Bryan Stevenson 

profiles clients of his 

Alabama-based Equal 

Justice Initiative, 

including Walter 

McMillian, wrongfully 

accused of murder, and 

Evan Miller, originally 

sentenced to life without 

parole at 14. 

Why 

“I just don’t think that 

white people have any 

clue that they live in a 

completely different 

world, and that the 

justice system is unfair. 

Stevenson is just so 

absolutely profound in 

the way that he talked 

about how we can help.” 

GUEST PROGRAMMER: 

Anita Kunz 

As Told to Katie Kilkenny 

FILM 

• Award-winning artist and 

illustrator Anita Kunz may be 

Canadian, but for over 30 years 

she has been creating illustrations 

and covers for America’s most 

iconic magazines. Among the 

over 2,000 illustrations she 

has produced since she began 

magazine work in 1980, Kunz has 

depicted then-First Lady Hillary 

Clinton as Joan of Arc for The 

New York Times Magazine and 

George W. Bush riding a horse into 

Iraq with blinders on for The New 

Yorker (Bush was the one wearing 

the blinders). She has long urged 

readers to reconsider social and 

political events in the United States 

and is working on a new project 

that draws deeply from art history. 

“I just don’t 

think that 

white people 

have any clue 

that they live 

in a completely 

different world, 

and that the 

justice system 

is profoundly 

unfair.” 

VISIT PSMAG.COM FOR MORE OF 

KUNZ’S RECOMMENDATIONS. 

ILLUSTRATOR 

NOVELIST 

The Piano 

Jane Campion’s film 

about a mute mother 

coming to terms with life 

in an arranged marriage 

was a surprise hit when 

it debuted in 1993. Made 

for $7 million, the film 

became New Zealand’s 

most successful 

international film ever. 

Jillian Tamaki 

Canadian illustrator and 

artist Jillian Tamaki is 

perhaps best known 

for the graphic novels 

she’s created with her 

cousin Mariko Tamaki, 

including Skim and This 

One Summer, the first 

graphic novel to receive 

a Caldecott Honor. 

Ian McEwan 

Though English novelist 

Ian McEwan first made 

his name writing gothic 

fables, in the last few 

decades his novels 

have veered toward 

realism, subsequently 

incorporating 

some sharp social 

commentary. 

Why 

“There was something 

about that movie. The 

quality of the filmmaking 

was really haunting. 

I love really great 

storytelling, but because 

I’m so visual, it’s such 

an added treat when [a 

film] is just as profoundly 

beautiful as this.” 

Why 

“I was invited to judge 

an award for the big 

graphic-novel and comics 

community, so I got to 

read a lot of these and 

they’re just astonishing— 

so authentic and very 

personal. I do one-off 

images, but these are 

really well-told stories.” 

Why 

“There are always these 

social concerns. There 

was one that had to do 

with somebody who had 

a stalker, there was one 

about climate change— 

they’re topical subjects 

that merit discussing, 

but he wraps a cloak of 

fiction around them.” 

PHOTO COURTESY OF ANITA KUNZ 



Divided by Design 

A magisterial new book tracks how the government segregated 

America—and how new policy, and new education, could save us. 

BY PETER C. BAKER 

Shelf Help 

The Boy Who Loved 

Too Much: A True Story of 

Pathological Friendliness 

• Jennifer Latson 

• Simon & Schuster 

Jennifer Latson’s impressively 

intimate debut follows three 

years in the childhood of Eli, 

who is one of approximately 

30,000 Americans with a 

genetic disorder called Williams 

syndrome. People with Williams 

can have cardiac problems, 

learning disabilities, motor 

complications—and a neartotal 

lack of social inhibitions. 

Hungry for connection and 

friendship, Eli is irrepressibly 

open with every stranger he 

meets; inevitably this backfires, 

instantly marking him as 

“different.” Watson intersperses 

evocative scenes from Eli’s life 

as he approaches high school 

with the history of the disorder. 

The emotional heart of the 

story is Eli’s relationship with 

his single mother, Gayle, who 

struggles with the impossible 

question of how to protect 

her too-trusting son while 

simultaneously preparing him 

to chart his own path in a world 

that is often dangerous for its 

least-skeptical souls. 


By all metrics, American 

housing is a world of selfperpetuating 

racial segregation. 

Black and white 

Americans, in particular, rarely live 

together. 

There is a strong tendency to view 

this phenomenon as the vexing, aggregate 

result of an uncountable number 

of local, uncoordinated decisions 

made mostly in the past. That story 

goes roughly like this: Historically, 

when black families tried to move 

into white neighborhoods, they would 

often be stymied by discriminatory 

sellers, real estate agents, or mortgage 

lenders. Whenever black families 

managed to clear these hurdles (and 

weren’t subsequently chased out by 

racial harassment), their prejudiced 

white neighbors would panic and 

start fleeing, often encouraged by opportunistic 

house-flippers. Property 

values would plummet, tax revenues 

would decline, and the cycle of neighborhood 

deterioration would begin. 

Today, black residents of these depressed 

neighborhoods rarely make 

enough money to move anywhere 

“nicer.” The cycle continues. 

Every piece of this story is, on its 

own, true. It all happened. Most of 

it still happens. But, as historian 

Richard Rothstein argues in his magisterial 

new book The Color of Law, 

the story is radically incomplete and 

lays the primary blame at the wrong 

doorsteps. Rothstein doesn’t let individual 

or neighborhood prejudice off 

the hook, nor does he deny the major 

role played by present-day income 

inequality. He insists, though, that 

contemporary segregation, far from 

being de facto or accidental, would 

not have come to exist without active 

encouragement by government: local, 

state, and—most of all—federal. 

The government policies Rothstein 

catalogs have all been documented 

and linked to segregation by other 

historians, but they have never been 

marshaled so comprehensively or with 

such rhetorical force. The Color of Law 

is that rarest of books: a detailed policy 

history powerful enough to shape not 

only your opinion but also your daily 

experience of the world. 

The first major chapter in the history 

of government-imposed segregation 

came during the Depression, when 

the New Deal Public Works Administration 

started building housing projects 

for the lower middle class. These 

projects were segregated as a matter 

of policy. White projects could only 

be built in officially designated white 

neighborhoods, and black projects in 

officially designated black neighborhoods. 

Previously, many lower-middleclass 

neighborhoods had been racially 

integrated, a possibility that the PWA 

policy did not recognize. In multiple 

cities, integrated neighborhoods were 

simply razed to the ground. 

The private market was nearly as 

segregated. Most local governments 

used zoning schemes intentionally 

designed to separate the races. A 1917 

Supreme Court decision made such 

practices illegal, but it was easy enough 

for municipalities to ignore the law, or 

find workarounds that targeted race 

without using racial language. The federal 

government helped: A presidential 

committee of outspoken segregationists 

in the Harding administration published 

a manual of best zoning practices 

obviously designed to help whites 

keep their neighborhoods white. 

Crypto-racist zoning was powerful, 

but imperfect. It couldn’t stop welloff 

blacks who had fought their way 

into the professional classes from trying 

to move into middle-class white 

neighborhoods. That would require a 

more substantial intervention: a fun- 



Color of w: 

A Forgotten History of 

How Our Government 

Segregated America 

• Richard Rothstein 

• Liveright 

damental reshaping of the American 

housing landscape. 

Before the 1930s, it was almost impossible 

for middle-class renters to 

purchase homes. Hoping to encourage 

them—home ownership was thought 

to inoculate citizens against communism—the 

federal government created 

mortgage-support programs like the 

Federal Housing Administration. The 

FHA insured bank mortgages, making 

them accessible to large swathes of the 

middle class for the first time. But in 

order to qualify for FHA protection, a 

house had to be in a “low-risk” neighborhood. 

And in order to be deemed 

low-risk, a neighborhood had to be 

entirely white. Mere proximity to a 

black neighborhood could be disqualifying. 

Neighborhoods were rewarded 

by the FHA for segregated schools; for 

restrictive neighborhood covenants 

banning future sales to non-whites; 

and for highways, boulevards, and other 

physical barriers that discouraged 

interracial mingling. Most favored of 

all were houses that were outside of 

racially mixed cities altogether, in new 

suburban subdivisions that could be 

guaranteed all-white from the start. 

Therefore, with extremely rare exceptions, 

only white Americans were 

in a position to accrue home equity—a 

reserve they could use to weather 

financial storms without moving, to 

fund their retirements, or to leave an 

inheritance to their children. Black 

Americans, by contrast, were increasingly 

forced into crowded neighborhoods 

and put at the mercy of slumlords 

and predatory lenders. Even after 

the discriminatory policies that had 

created these divisions ceased to exist, 

the divisions remained. Black households 

have less family wealth, which in 

America tends to mean less education, 

less access to work, less income, and 

less freedom to live where you please. 

For Rothstein, this is about more 

than setting the record straight. If contemporary 

segregation is traceable to 

government initiatives, he says, then 

it calls for a government remedy—not 

just morally, but legally. His case rests 

on the Thirteenth Amendment, which 

abolished slavery, and on the 1866 

Civil Rights Act, which prohibited actions 

that treated former slaves like 

second-class citizens. Crucially, the 

law explicitly mentions housing discrimination. 

On Rothstein’s reading, 

this means that government is legally 

obligated to fight segregation. 

As recently as 2007, Supreme Court 

Chief Justice John Roberts expressed 

his official opinion that housing segregation 

was the consequence of private 

discrimination, not law or government 

policy. In 2015, the Obama administration 

instated a new rule that required 

municipalities across the country to 

gather statistics on segregation and 

formulate plans to fight it. As this issue 

goes to press, it seems certain the 

Trump administration will axe that requirement. 

(In Rothstein’s estimation, 

it was unlikely to succeed anyway.) 

In the end, he offers a suggestion 

as depressing as it is inspiring: literal 

textbook reform. Almost no American 

schoolchildren learn that segregation 

has been government policy. Standard 

textbooks elide the issue, stressing 

instead the individual roles played by 

our regrettably prejudiced ancestors. 

Some future Supreme Court justice is 

studying American history right now. 

What is she learning? Maybe it’s time 

to start paying closer attention. 

•PETER C. BAKER is a Pacific Standard 

contributing editor in Illinois. 

Shelf Help 

Islamophobia and 

Racism in America 

• Erik Love 

• New York University Press 

This ambitious sociological 

study presents two arguments 

about Islamophobia in America. 

The first is that, while the 

term implies a purely religious 

prejudice, Islamophobia is best 

understood as a form of racism 

against many Americans who— 

regardless of their religion, 

geographic heritage, or ethnic 

identity—get sorted as racially 

“Middle Eastern” or “Muslim.” 

The second is that most Muslim, 

Arab, Sikh, and South Asian 

advocacy groups have generally 

opted to use a “colorblind” 

approach that eschews 

identifying Islamophobia as 

racism. In Love’s view, this 

strategy has prevented these 

groups from forming coalitions 

that could meaningfully resist a 

unified prejudice that, like it or 

not, affects them all. Whether 

you agree or not, the book 

is invaluable for its detailed 

chronicle of Muslim-American 

activism and its careful 

attention to the fascinating 

complexities, dilemmas, and 

paradoxes of racial identity. 




ONE LAST THING 

OBJECTS THAT MATTER 

Party 

Plates 

PHOTO BY JARREN VINK 

For Ohioans, the 21 st century’s scarlet 

letter is not a crimson character on the 

chests of adulterers, but rather a yellow 

license plate reserved for drunk drivers. 

Ohio and Minnesota are the only 

states that currently require offenders to 

use specialized license plates, but at least 

14 other states have introduced similar 

legislation. Proponents say marked 

plates—also known as party plates— 

serve as an effective deterrent against 

drunk driving and warn anyone sharing 

the road to be vigilant. Others argue they 

encourage police profiling. Experts agree 

on one thing, though: We’re likely to see 

more criminal registries and public notification 

schemes in the future. 

Public shame as punishment goes 

back centuries; Napoleon, for example, 

branded convicted criminals with a hot 

iron, which served both as punishment 

and as a permanent criminal record. 

Public criminal registries, which took 

off in the 1990s to track sex offenders, 

serve similar purposes today. Now 

there are registries for drug dealers, 

animal abusers, even dangerous dogs. 

Yet there is little evidence that registries 

prevent first-time offenses or reduce 

recidivism. At worst, they can effectively 

impose lifelong punishments. 

With criminal justice reform sweeping 

the country, politicians looking 

to cut budgets without appearing soft 

on crime may swap prison sentences 

for punishments that leverage social 

control. As Nathaniel Hawthorne ominously 

wrote in The Scarlet Letter, “he 

will be known!” 

—MEGHAN WALSH 

Public support for 

criminal registries 

has grown despite 

inconsistent evidence 

that they reduce crime, 

which social scientists 

attribute to a human 

need to feel a sense of 

control over threats. 


NATURE 

HYDR ATES 

Did you know that each person needs 

20-50 liters 

of fresh water a day to meet their basic needs 

for drinking, cooking and cleaning? * 

By preserving and restoring essential lands upstream, we help strengthen 

the natural flow, filtration and regulation of watersheds that supply drinking 

water to people across Latin America, North America and Africa. 

How can you help meet nature’s needs? Learn by visiting nature.org/water. 

* World Water Assessment Programme (WWAP)

Pacific_Standard__MayJune_2017_

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