Fear, like fire, is our friend when it isn’t raging out of control. Awareness of a potential threat activates the famous fight-or-flight impulse, facilitating a quick response. Once we realize the fright was actually a false alarm—that wasn’t a burglar you heard downstairs, just the cat—we rapidly return to a state of repose. But too often, people suffering from anxiety disorders fail to respond to the all-clear signal. This leaves them in an ongoing state of heightened tension, which—if it lasts long enough, or gets triggered often enough—can take a severe physical and mental ... Read More
The Bag Man
September 13, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
IT'S HARD TO IMAGINE that the attorney Stephen Joseph wasn’t seized by a fit of contrarian glee when he adopted the name “Save the Plastic Bag Coalition” for his organization, back in 2008. After all, most people advocating controversial industrial causes seek out names vague enough to induce a coma. But Joseph and his coalition aren’t hiding; for the past four years, they’ve waged an in-your-face, rhetorical and legal assault on the scientific claims and legislative efforts promoted by the growing legion of would-be bag banners—who regard the ubiquitous single-use plastic bag as ... Read More
Sarwidi Versus the Volcano
September 12, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
THE WORLD"S ONLY LOW-COST VOLCANO BUNKER is not a high-tech affair. Called the Rulinda—the name is a portmanteau of the Indonesian words for “emergency-protection room”—the bunker is a brick box that can, in theory at least, shelter nine adults from superheated ash for up to an hour. It features walls two feet thick, a door customized to face away from the relevant volcano’s particular blast pattern, and ground-hugging breathing holes that block toxic ash while admitting (mostly) healthy air. Any half-decent mason can throw up a Rulinda in a day or two for about $320. The science in ... Read More
Gangster Anthropologist
September 11, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
What's her deal? Jorja Leap immersed herself in the culture of Los Angeles’ notorious street gangs for over 10 years, interviewing and working with hundreds of active and former gang members. Isn’t that dangerous? “I started out in the late 1970s as this skinny little white social worker going into the projects.” When she returned to the streets years later as an anthropologist, former gang members she knew accompanied and vouched for her. “I’ve been in dangerous situations, but always felt very protected.” Complicating personal detail: Husband is a former LAPD deputy ... Read More
Infant Intelligentsia: Can Babies Learn to Read? And Should They?
September 10, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
THE VIDEO CLIP on Larry Sanger’s website shows the cofounder of Wikipedia looking both scholarly and paternal with his owlish glasses, thinning pate, open book, and lapful of chubby-cheeked 3-year-old. Sanger’s son is gazing hard at the book pages and pronouncing words with the charming r-lessness of a toddler: “Congwess shall make no waw wespecting an establishment of wewigion or pwohibiting the fwee exewcise theweof or abwidging the fweedom of speech or of the pwess…” It’s not clear whether the boy is working toward a doctorate, like his dad’s, or training to be our future ... Read More
Book Reviews: How the Wealth Gap Damages Democracy
September 7, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
Inequality and Instability. By James K. Galbraith, Oxford University Press. Affluence & Influence. By Martin Gilens, Princeton University Press. Reviewed by James Ledbetter, the op-ed editor of Reuters and the author, most recently, of Unwarranted Influence: Dwight D. Eisenhower and the D Military-Industrial Complex What do we mean by “inequality,” and why exactly is it bad for American democracy? Are we discussing inequality of wages within a given firm or industry? Or inequality in household income—i.e., the difference between the poor and the middle class, or ... Read More
A River Runs It
September 6, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
In these electronic gadget-saturated times it’s hard to imagine that a century ago, electricity was scarce, and expensive, in the United States. Inventor James W. Dawson of San Francisco proposed a solution: small-scale floating power plants that would draw energy from streams and rivers. Such machines “will be found especially serviceable for generating electricity to operate ice machinery in small towns where it would be otherwise impracticable to have a cold storage plant,” wrote Dawson in his 1907 patent application. “A large number of small plants of this character would be of ... Read More
Maven of Meth
September 5, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
Bad news, entrepreneurial fans of Breaking Bad, the hit AMC series about a middle-aged chemistry teacher turned drug kingpin: you cannot actually learn to cook crystal meth by watching the show. “They deliberately put in faulty steps. They’ll start with one method of synthesizing methamphetamine but then switch to another,” says Donna Nelson, professor of chemistry at the University of Oklahoma. “It’s like watching a video of someone starting out on a trip to Dallas and ending up in Chicago.” The abundant “meth” that appears on-screen is actually cotton-candy-flavored sugar ... Read More
Save the Trees, We’ll Save Your Life
September 3, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
IN JULY 2011, about a week before I landed in Western Borneo, a local man sent an ominous text message to his boss from deep within the jungle. For more than 10 years, this man had worked as a research assistant at the Cabang Panti Research Station, in the core of Gunung Palung National Park, a mountainous wilderness that contains some of Indonesia’s last lowland rain forest and remains a stronghold for orangutans, gibbons, and other primates. Like many protected areas in the developing world, Gunung Palung’s boundaries were poorly enforced, and the people from the hardscrabble communities ... Read More
The Safe Race
August 30, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
MINDY KALING is well positioned to become the next all-American girl—that funny, slightly neurotic, fundamentally lovable television personality who personifies the single woman of her era. Her comedic skills were honed during her years as a writer and actor on The Office, where she played the chatty, bubbly Kelly Kapoor. This fall, as the star of the Fox sitcom The Mindy Project, she will assume a proven persona: a single professional whose life is complicated by bad dates and wacky colleagues. While it remains to be seen whether Kaling can freshen this formula, her take on this comedic ... Read More
