I just got back from a talk with Robert Thurman and Danny Hillis at the Skirball Center here in Los Angeles. It was about religion, science and ethics, bringing together Danny’s viewpoint as a scientist and Robert’s viewpoint as a Buddhist scholar. Basically the equivalent of crack cocaine for my brain.

Thurman is the leading Tibetan Buddhist in America, a professor of religion at Columbia and buddy of the Dalai Lama. He’s just one seriously cool guy – take my word for it.

Danny Hillis is a genius. For me, the idea of genius isn’t just about being smart and having the intellectual horsepower. It’s about generativity, about making things. Well, in his spare time, Danny Hillis created the 10,000 year clock to illustrate his concept of ‘the long now’ – the idea that it’s a good idea to lead our lives now as if we’re having impact way beyond our own lives and that of our children. Hence, ‘long now’.

He’s also made a computer out of tinkertoys and been a Disney Imagineer and a zillion other things. I’d never met Danny in person, and the one thing that I noticed is that this guy is massive. He’s got these meaty bear paws, is at least 6’3”, and has the biggest head I’ve seen on a person. In fact, you could easily fit two of my heads inside his. All them neurons need a home, I tell ya.

But enough introduction. The conversation started civilly enough. Thurman talked about the 3 jewels (or refuges, or rattanas) of Buddhism: the Buddha, the dharma, and the sangha. Roughly speaking, that’s the teacher, the teachings, and the community.

Hillis then chimed in saying that science essentially has the equivalent. The teacher is nature itself, and the almost mystical ability of mathematics to model, explain and predict the world.

The teachings are the body of knowledge accumulated by many teachers. Each individual teaching is like a brick in a castle. Every once in a while, a teacher brings together a few bricks in a way to really enhance the edifice and create a whole new structure for insight – for example, when James Clerk Maxwell created the four equations of electromagnetism out of theretofore disparate fields of knowledge.

And then there is the practice of the community, which, like religion, has its own dogma – double-blind studies, peer review, reproducibility of results. Hillis emphasized that the dogma is there mostly in service of being careful to avoid the mistakes of the past.

By now a lively repartee was developing between Hillis and Thurman. And I’ve got to tell you: Robert Thurman is one funny dude. He was cracking jokes the whole time, and at least at one point, he made Danny Hillis lose it – tears, couldn’t talk, couldn’t breathe, the works. If you ever get a chance to see Thurman live, you should. The man’s a riot.

But I digress. Thurman picked up the thread at this point and talked about how the Dalai Lama has spent the last 20 years talking to scientists. He really likes science! Little known fact is that when Tenzin Gyatso, the current Dalai Lama, was a young man in India, he used to repair people’s Swiss watches for fun. Apparently Tenzin, like Danny, is an inveterate tinkerer.

In fact, Buddhism is simply about seeing reality as it is, which is why the Dalai Lama is so fond of science. All the Buddha ever did was to see reality, and to report that it was all right (as Thurman put it, cracking up the auditorium). “It’s fine!” he said, and proceeded to report that to all comers. When humans can understand reality, they release suffering. This can only be done by understanding yourself; otherwise you’re pretty much stuck.

At this point, Thurman shared one of his stories with us. In one of his earlier incarnations as a young bodhisattva, the Buddha decides to use his yogic powers and ascend to Heaven to have a chat with god. So he finds Brahma, who asks him imperiously whether he has an appointment.

Ah, no, not really, just kinda hanging out, ascending to the heavens, no biggie, I can always come back.

Alright, you can stay, says Brahma. What do you want?

Nothing. Just wanted to ask you why you created the world and how it all works.

At this point, Brahma starts just yammering away, saying some pretty official-sounding boilerplate, and then sending the bodhisattva back. The somewhat baffled young man starts to make his way out, but right outside the palace gate Brahma stops him.

“Okay, look, I know you just heard me say all that stuff, but I’m in my court, and it’s important to maintain appearances there, y’know? The fact is, I have no idea where it all came from and I have no idea how it works. I didn’t make it! It was here when I got here. I just happened to be the first one to get here.

“Then all the other people arrive, the thousands of mini-gods, and they see me here and think I’m in charge. For a while I tried to disabuse them, but then I realized it was totally futile, and I was provoking a crisis of confidence. Hence, the bluster you just heard.”

He sizes up the young bodhisattva, then continues: “Now you look like the kind of person who’s going to be a buddha, which means that you will figure it all out eventually. When you do, I want you to come up her and tell me how it all works, and tell those humans down there that it’s not all my fault when things go wrong.”

This was all prelude to the idea that the Buddha was actually a scientist – someone with an unwavering dedication to seeing reality.

At this point, Danny Hillis brings up the topic that became the center point of the night’s friendly sparring: “Can you prove reincarnation?”

The doctrine of reincarnation maintains that your soul never expires, and that you have had thousands upon millions of lives preceding this one, and just as many to come (which is different from ‘reintarnation’, which maintains that you will come back in the next life as a hillbilly).

You have to understand that, to Buddhists, this is a foundational belief. It’s presupposed so deeply that it’s not even a topic of debate. But it’s clearly something that Danny couldn’t countenance (and frankly, I’m not crazy about it either).

But Thurman was armed: supposedly a Prof. Ian Stevenson of the University of Virginia had done some studies 40-50 years ago with thousands of cases of reincarnation. I checked the reference, and it’s true: Stevenson was the head of the UVA Dept of Psychiatry for over 30 years and wrote hundreds of papers documenting some persuasive cases of potential reincarnation. Check out his Wikipedia entry here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Stevenson

Thurman then talked about how the doctrine of emptiness, or shunyata, is the central tenet of Buddhism. Shunyata is a difficult concept – one that Buddhist monks may take a lifetime to grasp fully. So if you don’t get it right away, rest easy. The basic idea is that things have no essence that’s separate from other things; the existence of everything is relational. Emptiness is not the same as nothingness; it’s about things having no essential self (or anatta).

Hillis agreed with this notion and with the futility of names and labels in general. He picked up a plastic bottle, “this particular solution to Schroedinger’s equation at this moment in time,” and pointed out that you could call this any number of things and it wouldn’t be any one of them.

Thurman is a disarmingly formidable debater because he’s such a deep-down Buddhist that he’s not even attached to the most fundamental tenets of the religion. When Danny Hillis said that he found it hard to believe the whole notion of incarnation, Thurman quipped back, “I only half-believe in it myself!”

He even recounted a story about a meeting between Carl Sagan and the Dalai Lama. Sagan poses to the Dalai Lama, “What if science incontrovertibly disproved the idea of reincarnation? What would you do then?” Apparently without missing a beat, the Lama replies, “I will stop believing in it!” The lightness with which Buddhists – even the biggest Buddhist of them all – hold their beliefs demonstrates to me their true adherence to non-attachment.

This is when the debate got interesting. Hillis said that in science, we can measure things: action potentials, mass, brain activity, etc. This whole ‘soul’ entity was simply not measurable; and besides that, what was the mechanism by which the soul traveled?

At this point, Thurman, who is obviously well-read in science, countered that in physics, you can’t really measure things anyway: “Schroedinger’s cat – how heavy is that?” One more hearty audience chuckle scored for the professor. I don’t believe Thurman fully grasped the idea of uncertainty – the impossibility of pinning down both the momentum and position of an elementary particle – so he was using a pop-science formulation to get back at Danny (who was prepared to catch the slip, by the way). But I did laugh.

Now it was time for Danny to challenge Thurman. He said, what if artificial intelligence progressed so far as to create sentient beings – would you then say that those beings had a soul? “Sure!” replies Thurman. Buddhism has no problem with that.

At this point, the conversation moved to the idea of death, and by extension, nothing. Thurman said that in Buddhism, you can’t have nothing. That means that there is no such thing as absolute nothing – there is always something there, which is the ground of being. The Buddhist argument for this was convoluted and subtle, and frankly, you’re going to have to ask Bob about it. But this is a point on which Hillis wholeheartedly agreed: even the ‘total void’ of space constantly has particles being created and annihilated. Indeed, one can experimentally measure the existence of these virtual particles in vacuum through the Casimir-Polder effect. Wild and crazy stuff.

The title of the discussion was ‘Science, Religion and Ethics’, so Hillis touched upon the subject. He and Thurman called ethics “being in the long now” – the idea of taking the course of action that makes the most sense in the very long run. Hillis extends this idea to several generations past one’s own children – witness the 10,000-year clock and his work with the Long Now Foundation. Thurman, with the Buddhist view, has all of eternity in mind.

They talked about a lot more, and Thurman cracked us up several more times with Star Trek jokes and irreverent comments. He even had a moment of righteous indignation when talking about war and leaders who lead us into war, and how humans, in their extreme cleverness, have now made war obsolete. War is impossible, since it’s impossible to win! For elaboration of this concept, he referred us to Jonathan Schell’s The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People.

I leave you with Thurman’s epilogue, which he called his ‘consolation prize.’ He admitted that after 45 years of studying all this stuff, this night, as he was talking to us, he was still far from enlightened (and his wife and kids can attest to that). However, Buddhism says that someday, we will all achieve buddhahood. It may take longer for some, less for others. But once you’ve achieved buddhahood and ultimate enlightenment, that insight penetrates all of time, all the way to the past, to the present day. So “we will all enjoy this evening together as nirvana retroactively.”

By that token, nirvana is now, as soon as you realize that it’s now. Enjoy this perfect moment.

Before I launch into the story, you should recognize that neither Randall nor I is a rabid sports fan. In fact, we couldn’t be bothered about organized sports at all. Our interest was in seeing China, breathing its air (occasionally), eating its food, practicing its language, and witnessing the spectacle of the games up close. And if we caught an event or two, even better.

Having attended the Games in Athens in 2004, I just wanted to marinate in the unique atmosphere the Olympics create: revelry and friendly competition between all nations; being amidst some of the most talented, hard-working, accomplished young folks on the planet; witnessing the spectacle of human achievement; seeing which country’s fans got wasted the most. Athens was an amazing experience, and I was eager to repeat it Beijing-style. As it turns out, Athens also became the touchstone by which Beijing would be judged, as Greece and China went about hosting the world’s biggest party in dramatically different ways.

Incheon our way to Beijing

If for some reason the story of our trip were to be read in Mrs Golding’s English class, she’d say that our stopover at Seoul/Incheon International Airport was an example of foreshadowing. Why? Seoul was awarded the hosting of the 1988 Olympics. At the time, Korea was at best a developing nation, their most visible product being Hyundai cars, famous for being a tin can on four wheels. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has a slightly mischievous habit of awarding the Games to countries that have a vision of being ready for it but aren’t quite yet. This corresponds roughly to the management technique of holding your employees to a higher standard than they hold themselves, and thereby propelling them to greater heights of achievement, hoping they can make it. Hence, the Olympics as catalyst for bringing Korea into the modern age.

Twenty years on, it would seem as if the gambit worked. Samsung and LG are world-renowned brands, Hyundai makes some of the most reliable cars on the planet (with a new 375-horsepower luxury model that just came out stateside), and Korea is officially the most connected country on Earth, with more broadband connections per capita than anywhere else (and a videogame-obsessed populace that has professional leagues). We did not get a chance to head into town, but we did get to hang out at the airport’s Cultural Experience Zone, which I’m sure is just as good. I mean, look at the sign! And the traditionally-dressed lady!

Moreover, I can tell you that the airport was a gleaming, spotless piece of work — a hell of a lot nicer and user-friendlier than any Heathrow, Kennedy, or Frankfurt am Main. Free internet access, excellent food at the restaurants, and seats comfortable to sleep on took the sting out of our long layovers, making them almost pleasant.

Also, a quick thank-you note to Korean Airlines for providing the best flight experience in recent memory. The entertainment system was excellent, allowing me to catch up on my summer movies (Kung Fu Panda, Smart People and Iron Man). The authentic Korean food was downright edible, the seats were napworthy, and the flight attendants way cute.

As a reminder of our destination, we were sharing our flight with the Polish handball team. These lankily muscular, handsome fellows were all clad in bright-red Polska-emblazoned uniforms — which made them particularly easy to spot when they made up half the population of the smoking room in the airport.

Asserting hegemony over the food chain, or eating random stuff we probably shouldn’t

Randall and I made a pact at the beginning of the trip to eat at least one item that we’ve never eaten before every day. This proved to be really, really easy to do — the adventurousness of our palate and utter disregard for gastrointestinal comfort were the only limits.

Our Lonely Planet guide provided an appetizing description of Wangfujing snack street, just off the main Wangfujing shopping drag, with its street vendors of skewers of various tasty meats, fruits and desserts. So we were off. We walked around in the sweltering 36C (97F) heat, checking out all these skewers piled up on top of each other, without a whole lot of refrigeration in sight. And the crazy thing was, the locals were buying this stuff by the dozen. There was the familiar — pork, chicken, squid. There was the out-of-the-ordinary — chicken hearts, kidneys, crabs, funny little fish. And then there was the exotic — seahorses, starfish, cicada larvae, and scorpions. Not just scorpions, mind you, but live scorpions. When you flicked the skewer, the scorpions wiggled. Freaky-neat.

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At this point, any sensible human being would go, “Wow, that’s really cool,” and, it being the very first day of the trip, proceed to get a coconut and some fried rice, and sit down for a facsimile of a normal meal to ease himself into this strange land. Which is why we ordered the fresh scorpion. The vendor dunked them in reassuringly hot oil, fried the bugs and handed them to us. We each ate two, which provided us with enough proof of concept: scorpions are rich, and like cricket or bee, taste like greasy fries.

Our culinary guide for the first evening was our Harvard dorm-mate Wei, who graciously hosted us at his super-nice pad in what we found out later was the best area in town. Namely, the Chaoyang district, prime expat hangout. He took us to a Sichuan spot that same night, a stone’s throw from the pad, on Chunxiu Lu. Here, he introduced us to the concept of shuizhuyu (roughly pronounced shoe-ay joo yu) — literally, water-boiled fish. Except that the fish — the whole fish, and nothing but the fish — is really boiled in a vast vat of oil, along with a bunch of veggies, spices, onions, whole garlic cloves and blazing-hot spices, all served in a bigass platter. The oil is infused with four-alarm chili peppers and black peppercorns that make your mouth numb, or ma. Hence the term mala, ‘numb and spicy’, the hallmark of Sichuan cuisine. For some strange reason, this Sichuan speciality, common as corn over there, is hard to come by in U.S. restaurants. In any case, the fish was delectable, and we had the dish a few more times over the course of our visit. Note: your wimpy American innards will probably react violently to this lively concoction for the succeeding 2-3 days (the term volcanic comes to mind), but you should be fine after that. Maybe.

On a side note, over our travels, I found that eating the food nibble-by-nibble with chopsticks allowed us to appreciate and savor it better. It also slows down the rate of food consumption since you can only stuff your face so fast with two sticks (especially if you happen to be a clumsy white dude). Physiologists believe that the satiety signal the gastrointestinal tract sends to the brain telling it “you’ve devoured enough calories to fuel two marathons; stop already” comes from the duodenum. Food takes about 15 minutes to get to the duodenum, so if you eat food that’s too rich too fast — eminently achievable with the use of fork, knife and spoon, which are like power tools compared to chopsticks — you run the risk of overshooting the satiety signal’s calorie limit. If you do this chronically, you end up with a nation of fat people (e.g. the US). Chinese people seem predominantly slim (for now) in spite of their greasy cuisine, and I’m thinking it has to do with their tendency to walk and bike around, the still-low prevalence of Western-style junk food, their reverence for mealtimes — and the Chopstick Factor. Move over, French Paradox.  You heard it here first.

Back to the food. A brief primer on Chinese cuisine: As would be expected of a nation as vast as the US and four times as populous, there’s quite a variety of food in China. Northern (e.g. Beijing) cuisine tends to be fried and salty. Southern (Cantonese) cuisine is more intricate and flavorful, the haute-cuisine of the land, reserving the right to make fun of the rest. Uighur (pronounced WE-gur) is Muslim cuisine — lamb- and beef-intensive and pork-free. Western (Sichuan) cuisine is spicy as hell, and Eastern (Shanghai) cuisine is obsessed with pickling things. A Chinese saying encapsulates it thus: dong suan, xi la, nan tian, bei xian (East sour, West spicy, South sweet, North salty).

Every restaurant we visited handed us a novel-length menu, replete with full-color photos of every item, and the (occasionally) useful English description. Strange and borderline contraband delicacies abounded — abalone, giant whelk, shark’s fin soup, sea cucumber. I’ve never seen so many over-$100 menu items anywhere before (some of them up to $500). Where do these items come from, why are they so pricey, and who eats them? Sea cucumbers are sea-floor creatures, and they’re caught with bottom-dragging nets, which wantonly destroy entire habitats at a time. And fishermen kill whole sharks, magnificent top predators of the sea, just to harvest a stringy, cartilaginous fin. These and other items like tiger penis, which don’t necessarily taste all that good, achieved delicacy status through their supposed aphrodisiac power (NB: There is no food item with a scientifically documented aphrodisiac effect except alcohol and maaaybe chocolate). Also, affluence requires signs to display it, and these restaurants oblige the rising class of conspicuous consumers. I had heard about how demands for exotic foods endanger many a species and habitat, but to see it happening so casually on every street corner was sobering.

Meanwhile, our mission to gleefully blaze through as many species of flora and fauna possible continued unabated. We had a dark green, broccoli-esque vegetable we couldn’t finish because it was too bitter, which we later found was ‘bitter gourd’ (surprise!). The cold sliced donkey tasted pretty much like roast beef, the fried soft-shell crab was too greasy, the giant black snails were passable, thousand-year egg was harmless, the fried honeybees tasted pretty much like the scorpion, and the rats of the sky (i.e. fried pigeon) we did not try. Rounding out the list is garlic shoots (yum), dragonfruit (double yum), bai jiu liquor (vile), turtle ‘edge’ (flavorless cartilage), rice-stuffed lotus root (excellent), and smoked bamboo. And of course, fried ‘crap’. Not just crap, but catty crap. One restaurant had it on the menu, and how could we resist? Said crap was brought to our table for inspection, alive and flopping in a bucket, before meeting its shuizhuyu fate. Now that’s freshness.

Two culinary experiences are de rigueur in Beijing: hotpot and roast duck. For the latter, our good man Wei took us to King Duck, one of the best duck spots in town. Here, they elevated the serving of roast duck to a near art form: the white-clad chef brought a whole duck to our table and proceeded to precision-carve the large pieces of meat, then to slice up the chunks in a sushi-intricate way and lay them on a platter. They give you thin pancakes, scallions and sweet hoisin sauce so you can make a Peking duck burrito with the whole thing and scarf it down. The skin is the most prized part of the duck, so don’t even think about removing it, health nut.

At a hotpot restaurant, you order a vat of base broth — we encountered mild, spicy, and tomato-infused — and then dunk various meats and veggies into it once it starts boiling on the gas burner at your table. The meat slices take mere seconds to cook, so you just dunk-and-nosh. It’s great fun and very tasty, and the resulting combo broth at the end, containing the essence of all the animals and vegetables who took a boiling swim in it, is quite flavorful.

For your reference in case you’re headed to Beijing, some of the good places we ate at:

– Feiteng Yuxiang Sichuan Restaurant, on Chunxiu Lu just south of Dongzhimenwai Dajie; super authentic with VIP booths and yards of beer, Chaoyang District

– South Beauty (also Sichuan food), 2nd floor of west wing of China World Trade Center, Chaoyang District

– Three Guizhou Men, Chaoyang District (order the braised pork)

These places are totally posh, and still no meal will ever cost more than $25. Unless you choose to drink yourself to oblivion, in which case it’ll cost $30 plus hangover tax the next day.

Aoyun hui! – or, oh yeah hey, that whole Olympics thing

The Olympics were the original pretext for getting us out to China, and I can say with certainty that they did actually happen. End of story.

Beijing the city

Beijing (bei, north, jing, capital) is an impressive city. Seat of the Chinese empire for over 2000 years, it’s worth a visit any time of year. And it’s simply vast – over 16,000 square kilometers. Tourist venues abound, and despite its size, quaint attractions can be found nestled in various corners … uh, what’s that? You want to hear about the Olympics? I can’t just say “well, you saw it on TV already” and leave it at that? Awright, fine, I was just pulling your leg. Quaint and nestled in the same sentence should have tipped you off.

From your man on the ground

So let me tell you all about aoyun hui (roughly, ‘awe yoon hway’, Olympics). My primary impression of the organizers was that they were trying to seem welcoming while being paranoid at the same time. You already got a feeling of that with the news reports of all the unsubstantiated terrorist threats, and the government reaction to the protests along the path of the torch relay. As you may imagine, being nasty and nice at the same time is a tough act.

This attitude was in direct contrast to the overwhelmingly welcoming (yet still circumspect) attitude of the Greeks four years ago. Whereas in Athens, there were central places to congregate, meet fans from other countries, swap stories and tickets and bump into athletes, there was no such thing in Beijing. The so-called Olympic Green — a vast, barren, concrete-and-asphalt complex containing most of the sports venues as well as the Athlete’s Village — seemed deliberately designed to discourage congregation of people for fun. Aside from a few outdoor TV screens showing Team China, there wasn’t anywhere to hang out. And you could only get into the whole complex if you had a ticket for an event happening that selfsame day. This was unfortunate, because a lot of fans felt exiled from the games they traveled thousands of miles to see.

But security had to come first. Before entering a venue, you were thoroughly frisked by a smiley-faced, white-gloved volunteer. And even if you had a credentialed pass to get into, say, the tennis venue, and you happened to be one of the co-organizers of the event (such as the American lady we had dinner with one night), there was still was a chance you couldn’t get in. There were these green-clad soldier-dudes all over the place, looking stern, solemn and not a day over 17. Presumably, they were there to make me feel safe –that’s nice. But I did have a vision of them springing into action to take down that lone hippie who’d yell “Free Tibet!” or “Go Falun Gong!” Ah, the joys of totalitarian states.

To say the Chinese went above and beyond the call of duty to stage these Games would be an understatement. They went all out. The $40-45 billion budget for these Olympics dwarfs the piddling $13 billion spent on Athens (which nearly bankrupted Greece). The beautiful, gleaming, hypermodern venues; the beautiful, gleaming, hypermodern subway; the fleet of gleaming, beautiful black Audi A6’s dedicated to shuttling around athletes and officials; the explosion of more fireworks than all the previous 28 Olympiads combined; and an opening ceremony so over-the-top as to defy description — no expense was spared.

And yet, as a visitor, I felt strangely cold. There is a difference between being officially welcoming, by playing the Beijing Welcomes You song incessantly over the radio, and actually making people feel welcome. And the Beijing metropolis, with all the poor people and beggars expelled to the provinces, factories shut down, half the cars banned and rain controlled by rockets, felt like the World’s Largest Potemkin Village. Whom they thought they had fooled is anyone’s guess. Countless jumbo blue walls all over the city carried the Beijing 2008 motto, “One world, One dream” in umpteen languages. But you couldn’t help but wonder whether Tibetans, human rights activists, or even you, casual Western tourist with ideas of your own that just may be at odds with those of the Chinese government, were part of this One World.

To be fair, yes, there were volunteers, and I can believe the official count of 100,000. They were on practically every Beijing street corner, sitting on a tiny stool and wearing the trademark red volunteer armband. Except that hardly any of them spoke English. Or could provide useful information about the neighborhood, even when asked in (admittedly choppy) Chinese. The smiley blue-and-white shirted official volunteers in venue booths did speak English and were more helpful. But in 30+ of such booths visited, not a single one could produce a schedule of the events. No schedule! Anywhere! Just guess where things are happening when, head out, and good luck with tickets (NB: full schedules were available online, just no printed ones to carry).

Few tickets, many fans

Speaking of tickets, they were scarce. The journalists with the credentials and the stacks of tickets handed to them beforehand can’t tell you that, but this here Man on the Ground can. Granted, we could have put more effort into ticket acquisition, and ultimately did find some enterprising young folks who had them at reasonable rates. But there was no official route for ticket acquisition, since all 6 quidzillion tickets had technically sold out before the Games ever started. This was baffling in light of seeing most venues 40-70% empty once you were inside. We did go to a couple of scalper’s markets right outside the venues to see if we could score, and we did. However, the mostly Chinese scalpers were asking for exorbitant prices — sometimes marked up 300 times the ticket price. My guess is that they were hoping that the silly rich Westerners would be so eager to see the events that they would cough up any amount of money. One scalper memorably demanded $147 (1000 RMB) for a $5 handball ticket at 2.30pm — when the game had already started at 2!

Now if you were a rabid enough fan, cough up you did. Gymnastics and swimming were going for legendary prices, and a friend felt lucky to score gymnastics tix for $200 each. Again, the normal fans without connections or unlimited cash — the backpackers, the youngsters, the oldsters, the families whose last name wasn’t Gates, Buffett, or Walton — were left high and dry, such as the mother outside the Green holding up a sign saying she needed a swimming ticket to see her daughter compete.

In the end, we did see some events, and it’s always fun to see how the fans from the various countries behave. Most had learned how to cheer in Chinese — Idali jiayou! (”Go Italy!”). And so did we, letting out hearty war-whoops of Meiguo jiayou! when American boxer Raynell Williams took to the canvas. Of course, the fastest way to get a hearty chuckle out of a Beijinger was to wave your little Chinese flag and say Zhongguo jiayou! (jung-guo ja-yo) and let them marvel at the spectacle of a white dude attempting Mandarin. Giving directions to the Mongolians from Ulaan Baataar was a highlight, as was meeting the Thai boxing fans dressed in full traditional regalia. (picture)

Heineken Holland House was another highlight, home base for the Dutch fans and a well-oiled nightly party machine. Ah, how I missed it from Athens — so glad to see you guys again! The solidarity, unbridled delight and raucousness of the Dutch fans and their nightly celebration of their successful Olympians was a joy to behold and something the Americans could well emulate at future games (ya hear, Budweiser?). Particularly refreshing were the impromptu regular appearances of Jan Peter Balkenende, Prime Minister of Holland, chatting with the fans, fielding questions and having pictures taken with him, with no intermediaries, handlers, bodyguards or velvet rope in sight.

Unfortunately, these parties were shut down at 2am by Chinese edict (although, mysteriously enough, the ones next door at Club Bud went till 5am). Officially, no bar was allowed to serve alcohol within a 2km radius of a venue, and all revelry was to stop by 2. Luckily, this is not what actually came to pass, and most late-night venues continued to be late-night venues. Still, when you go to a country you just know if they’re party people. Greeks are party people — heck, they probably invented the party. Italians are party people. Iranians are party people. The Spanish, Irish and Dutch are definitely party people. On the other hand, Americans are not party people (how many cities in the US can you stay out in past 2am?). Too damn hardworking for their own good. The Chinese are party people — it’s just that Communist is the wrong kind of party.

There’s gold in them thar random sports

During our time in the apartment, we caught some of the Olympic action on one of the 14 state TV channels (which are actually pretty good). Just like in the US, the action was focused on the homeboys and homegirls — Chinese athletes kicking several metric tons of ass in weightlifting, boxing, judo, gymnastics, shooting, archery, rowing, and fencing. Waitasec, let me re-read that part — Shooting? Archery? Rowing? Fencing? Yes, the highfalutin’ Euro sports put in there just the way Baron Pierre de Coubertin wanted them became the medal fields for the host country to reap.

The cognitive dissonance resolves itself once you realize that this is the end result of the policy of juguo, or ‘whole nation’. Starting in 1979, the government would screen young hopefuls, and if they fit the biometric parameters, would employ them as athletes, completely controlling their careers. (Amusing sidenote: Olympic light-flyweight gold medal boxer Zhou Shiming was initially disqualified by this process because his reach wan’t long enough, but they snuck him past the inspectors somehow.) To this observer, the state-funded factory farming of medals seems strangely at odds with the Olympic spirit and a pretty honest display of some inferiority complex the government seems to have. And somehow a bunch of metal discs strung on a ribbon are going to make up for that? Even in China, on the website of the state-run news agency Xinhua, this appropriation of massive resources to the cause of jingoism has been called “profligate” and “extremely unfair.” So, organizer dudes — are the Olympics a platform for promoting international friendship, or a stage for displaying China’s nascent supremacy? You sure got us confused. In the meantime — zhongguo jiayou!

Then again, perhaps it makes sense not to take the Olympics too seriously. Founded by Baron Pierre de Coubertin, the modern Olympics started as a plaything of the European aristocracy and continues to be so to this day, giving otherwise unemployed people like Prince Albert of Monaco something to do. Political displays are no stranger to the Games (Berlin 1936, Munich 1972, Moscow 1980, Los Angeles 1984). And what was most on display in Beijing was money, money, money: Lenovo, Audi, China Telecom, McDonald’s, Coke. The fact that the last two companies are in the business of making people fat and unhealthy with tasty poison is irrelevant to the sporting event.

So, as long as you take the Olympics for exactly what it is — big money supporting a big sporting event with its attendant corruption and scandal, and the host country given a chance to showboat — you can enjoy it plenty. Start hearkening back to some true spirit of the Games, which arguably never existed, and it becomes less fun. Buddy, this is the true spirit of the Games.

Death Race 2008, or a Beijing cab ride

Cab rides in every city offer singular insight into the local culture.  First off, you need to know that Beijing cabs are dirt cheap.  The initial charge is 10 yuan ($1.47), which is sufficient for most short hops.  20 yuan means you traveled far, and almost no cab ride will exceed 30 yuan.

I had heard alarming things about driving in China, but was pleasantly surprised to find that, aside from some stylistic differences, it wasn’t so bad in Beijing (more reason to worry in the provinces, apparently).  The miracle was that you had cyclists, pedestrians and cars all sharing the streets at their own pace, weaving into each other while seemingly oblivious to one another, with nary an accident was to be seen.  The first dozen times that our cab driver would drive enthusiastically into a thicket of street-crossing pedestrians, I gasped in horror, thinking surely blood will be on our hands.  On right-hand turns, cabbies had no compunctions about ramming straight through the one-foot gap between walking couples — so not Santa Monica (but very New York). They also had no problem nearly broadsiding each other on left turns.  No right of way here; only get your way.  In spite of it all, the accidents we dreaded never happened, and we lived to tell.

Sightseeing and, um, culture

Let the record show that Sir Randall and I started this trip with sterling intentions. We invested time and money in learning Chinese beforehand. We agreed to sample the cuisine liberally and without prejudice, gastric turmoil be damned. We resolved to meet the natives, to attempt earnestly to communicate in their tongue, and to get a true feel for the Middle Kingdom.

Let the record also show that somewhere along the line, this noble resolve started to fray. And then gradually erode. And then come tumbling down in a vast landslide of crude jokes, shameless ethnocentrism, body noises and good ol’ American ignorance. Who knew that beneath the well-meaning façade of a brace of well-educated would-be cultural attaches lurked Beavis and Butthead, quietly awaiting their turn in the sun to crack a fart joke.  Preferably in a temple.

This first trip to East Asia made me just realize just how much I was a product of my culture. As an Iranian, I’m still steeped in an Indo-European heritage shared from the banks of the Ganges all the way to California. As an American and Westerner, I’m heir to the Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian traditions. None of this has a toehold in China, leaving me without a frame of reference. And this is after studying Chinese philosophy for over a decade. The writing is all squiggles I couldn’t make out or somehow fudge. A strange homogeneity seemed to reign over the populace, above and beyond the influence of Communism. As the saying goes, “The bird that sticks its head out of the bushes gets shot.” Saving face seemed to take precedence over rationality. I was delighted, baffled, delighted again, confused, then just accepting — yurp, this here place sure’s different. Still, it was the first time that I couldn’t wait to get back home from a trip. Sometimes you just need things to make sense around you again.

And so the sightseeing was different. When I went to see the Parthenon, it was a religious experience. After studying it for so long, being on a first-name basis with Kallikrates and Phidias, knocking back ouzo with them, here it was, a monument to beauty, time, and the human mind. Were the palaces in the Forbidden City any less? Was the Summer Palace complex not an order of magnitude more majestic than Versailles? But this here yankee wasn’t equipped to get it yet. So I tacitly acknowledge the greatness of all that we saw, knowing that as my Chinese improves and with it, my understanding of this rich culture, I will get it.

In the meantime, the Forbidden City is awe-inspiring. And the city-sized (no joke) Summer Palace probably impressed and intimidated any visiting dignitary with its gleefully brazen display of imperial wealth and power. The Lama Temple had a giant 55ft (18m) Maitreya Buddha carved out of a single piece of sandalwood — very cool. The Temple of Heaven, where emperors made offerings to ensure a good harvest, was beautifully serene, and the Great Wall was one impressive beast. I finally understood what they meant by “I climbed the Great Wall” — in places, the Wall goes up at a 45 degree angle, and you almost have to rappel down.

Engrish Anguish

With the darn buildings out of the way, let’s get to the interesting stuff — namely, signs in mangled English, or Engrish, as we hereby dub the new language (e.g. ‘crap’ as in the menu above). The Engrish ranged from the discrepant (funny), misguided (very funny), absurd (hilarious) to nonsensical (no longer funny — see section on Bob Mankoff in New Yorker Conference article below). Right here are some of the choice morsels from the hundreds of candidates that we saw. No Roman characters in China would escape the dread clutches of Engrish, oh no.

Of course, we retaliated for the Engrish by savaging the Chinese language whenever we attempted to use it. One of the reasons why Chinese is such a challenge to a Westerner is because of tones. Here’s the story: each Chinese syllable, represented by a character, is made up of an initial consonant and a final vowel — an initial and a final for short. So you can’t have a consonant at the end of a syllable (with the exception of nasalized -n or -ng, as in chang). Ma is allowed; mad is not. You figure there are 20-30 each of initial and final sounds, giving you a repertoire of 800 possible words. This clearly isn’t enough to encode a full language, so you create diversity by adding a melodic element, or tone. With 5 tones (flat, up, down-up, down and short-neutral), you have now increased the repertoire of syllables to 4000 or so. Combine syllables in pairs, and now you can generate enough symbolic diversity to code for all the stuff in your environment without too much overlap.

But overlap still happens, and because of the limited coding potential of the initial-final system, there’s a lot more overlap than alphabetic languages, which have essentially infinite coding capacity. And yet, English has tons of overlap, too, and most of us can figure out from context whether whether we want to play a set of tennis, we’re all set for the evening, we need a set of silverware or we just had a broken bone set.

The problem is that the Western ear uses tones to encode for other things like mood and mode. Am I feeling lighthearted? Am I asking a question? My tones go up and down accordingly. And if I was talking at a Chinese friend’s family dinner, I may have just told him that his horse (ma, 3rd tone, down-up) is an excellent cook instead of his mother (ma, 1st tone, flat). Which I’m sure I did countless times on this trip.

The picture below illlustrates the point: four (si) sounds like death (also si, but different tone).  In Hong Kong, they’re way superstitious about such things, so there is no 4th, 14th or 24th floor.  Most Beijing buildings have a 4th floor, but ours was built by a Hong Kong company — hence the omissions.

And then there are the characters. There is no alphabet; each character is unique. The average Chinese person knows about 4000 of them. There is a bit of a phonetic and logical element to each character, which I’m not going to get into here, but the only real way to be able to pronounce a character is to know it beforehand. If you haven’t seen it before, you’re basically screwed. Then there’s the simplified character set, in use in mainland China, and the more complex traditional character set, in use in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore. And then there’s the cursive handwritten script, which looks significantly different from its printed counterpart. All in all, this is a lot of information and complexity to handle. Apparently it takes a schoolkid a good 5 years to master all these elements. I am in awe any time someone can speak, read and write this language with effortless ease. I’ll be able to do it better someday, but for now, it all seems miraculous.

Transliteration frustration

One thing that I did not understand before starting my Chinese lessons was this: why does the transliteration of Chinese words into English sound different than the way they look?  Why is ‘Wang’ really ‘Wong’, and ‘Mao Zedong’ really ‘Mao Tsedong’?  Presumably, you turned it into English so you could actually read it.  Why not write it the way you want it pronounced?

Turns out that this is because what we’re looking at is basically a transliteration (or romanization) system, namely pinyin.  And the letters, which look like our own, may as well be Cyrillic or Arabic, because there is no one-to-one correspondence between pinyin letters and English sounds.  The pinyin C, for example, is ts — Cao is pronounced tsao.  Z is like dz.  And there’s no a priori way for you to know that.  The very common surname Wang is pronounced more like wong, which is why you see both spellings Stateside.

All cheekiness aside, this was one of my most enlightening trips. China has an ancient, venerable, deep, and challenging culture, well worth studying and understanding. People, countless numbers of people, waves of people, moutains of people, so many people that the entire population of the US is a rounding error in the number of Chinese people (0.3 billion vs 1.3 billion), all of them living, loving, eating, working and somehow getting by, is a wonder to behold. And should even a fraction of them succeed in their seeming quest to become more like meat-eating, fuel-burning, all-consuming Americans, boy is Planet Earth in for a ride. In any case, I encourage all of my readers to learn Chinese. It’s fun and useful to speak the language of your future boss.

]]> http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/abinazir/2008/09/05/beijing-2008-cultural-culinary-and-linguistic-misadventures/feed/ 1 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/abinazir/2008/08/27/the-new-yorker-conference-2008-a-hail-of-big-ideas/ http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/abinazir/2008/08/27/the-new-yorker-conference-2008-a-hail-of-big-ideas/#comments Wed, 27 Aug 2008 23:48:35 +0000 abinazir http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/abinazir/?p=29 Last year was the first time The New Yorker magazine organized a conference around innovators. At first, I was a bit skeptical, especially since the whole affair lasted just a day and cost a pretty penny and a half. But over the weeks, as every issue of the magazine teased me with yet another brilliant speaker eager to share presto-neato ideas with the world, I decided to plunk down — to find that it was sold out. I had already bought my plane ticket to New York City, so I flew in anyway and spent some quality time with friends. Of course, not before making a quasi-valiant effort at socially engineering my way into the conference — le système D, as the wily French put it.  But pan out it did not, leaving me resolved that this business of being shut out of overpriced conferences will never happen again.

So when the 2008 edition of the conference was announced, I made a big sticky note of the date and time online registration opened, and hopped on it mere seconds after the e-doors opened at 9.00am PST on February 6, 2008. This time the conference cost two pretty pennies, but clearly that was not going to deter this here man on a mission. I was in, baby, in. Later I was informed by one of the kind organizers that I was the very first registrant. Zealotry = results.

Fast forward to the morning of Thursday, May 8. I arrived by cab on a rainy New York morning before the whimsically imposing InterActive Corp (IAC) Headquarters building by the Chelsea Piers. The first impression I got of this building was of a giant wedding cake, with a lot of reflective meringue frosting, if that makes any sense. The swoopy lines and curvilinear facade practically scream “Frank Gehry was here.” And the frosted glass with the transparent bands makes it look like the entire building is wearing sunglasses. And as we all know, people and buildings who wear sunglasses are cool. Even without that, the IAC building is pretty damn cool. Amazing what you can build these days with a spare billion or two.

Keynote address: Malcolm Gladwell and the mismatch problem

The interior was aesthetically pleasing and superbly well laid-out I’m sure, but at this point the 7.50am priorities of my brain had decided to ignore everything except what was on the delectable breakfast spread just inside the front entrance. Afterwards, body sated and lizard brain pacified on bagels, lox, juice and fruit, I stationed myself third row center for the keynote speaker, Malcolm Gladwell, who was to discuss the mismatch problem — a preview of his upcoming book on how to hire the right person for the job.

To motivate his discussion, Malcolm introduced the combine, the recruiting protocol from professional sports. Combines bring together every eligible athlete and the most senior talent scouts from every professional team for a multi-day battery of testing — sprints, endurance tests, intelligence quizzes, cookie baking contests, the usual. As it turns out, the results have a poor correlation with the promise of the athletes it selects. As an example, Malcolm mentioned that in the most recent NBA draft, the top 3 scorers in the combine either didn’t make the NBA or didn’t get to play much at all. Conversely, two of the top three rookies in the NBA this year performed mediocrely (or worse) at the combine — 62/81 for Greg Odin and 21/81 for Al Horford. In the National Football League, the Wunderlich test, an intelligence test administered to all prospective quarterbacks, performs even worse. The 7 worst scorers on this test (amongst whom Dan Marino and Terry Bradshaw) outperformed the 7 best scorers by miles (which is thousands of yards).

And so you have the mismatch problem: tests that evaluate the wrong competencies for the task at hand. Malcolm also discussed mismatch issues in credentialing teachers, training cops, politicians, airline pilots and physicians.

From my own experience (see post below on ‘Why you should not go to medical school’), I can tell you that the pre-medical training that undergraduates are obligated to follow has next to no bearing on what they will do in medical school, which in turn has limited bearing upon actual medical practice. What premeds learn in organic chemistry, classical mechanics and advanced mathematics they are likely never to use — not even once — in the course of a non-academic medical career. These take up valuable semesters that a premed could be spending learning something about epidemiology — real diseases requiring real solutions — or even practicing patience and compassion through public service.

But I digress. Malcolm concluded his talk with two reasons why it’s time to get rid of the combine: hard, objective, seemingly clear statistics and numbers don’t seem to account for uncertainty when it comes to hiring people (because even without beards and wool sweaters, people are inherently fuzzy); and with rising standards, the complexity of such decision-making is increasing.

Before I continue with the next speaker, a note about the backdrop of the conference: the 120-ft (36m) by 11ft (3.3m) IAC Video Wall, ‘the largest high-resolution screen in the world’. If Oscar Wilde was correct in his assessment that nothing succeeds like excess — hello success. For all of you guys out there who boast of your 60-inch flatscreen TV or whatnot, allow me to put this into perspective: this is a 1440-inch flatscreen (technically 1446, since it’s measured diagonally). Consider your monitor ego pummeled.

Gavin Newsom

Gavin Newsom, the mayor of San Francisco, was next. He may be the most charismatic individual I’ve encountered in person. Tall (6′3″ at least) with bright blue eyes, politician-perfect sleek hair and chiseled features, the guy is unreasonably good-looking. The way he holds his body, waves his hands and broadcasts his voice was oratorical in the grand Caeser-like tradition, as if addressing the whole Coliseum, even though we were just a few feet away from him. The man knows how to project, and he has conviction in his voice. Look for him in an upcoming gubernatorial, senatorial or presidential campaign — the boy is good.

Newsom also knows the power of the Big Idea, and he’s had some decent ones so far. He’s taken recycling in San Francisco from 20% to 50% to 72%, and talked about “giving incentive to people to do the right thing.” He’s banned plastic bags in the city, is phasing out plastic bottles, and wants to institute mandatory composting. “More politicians need to screw up,” he exhorted, encouraging his peers to take more risks and “fail forward fast” without letting the fear of media reprisal to hold them back. He talked about the creation of ‘green-collar jobs’, creating the country’s largest alternative fuel fleet in San Francisco (plug-in hybrids?), and replacing the payroll tax with a carbon footprint tax. Altogether, he cuts a visionary, dynamic, yet pragmatic figure who gets real results (and landslide re-election numbers — 72% for his last run). To all his detractors who say he’s full of air or too slick, I present to you Exhibit A, the tires on my Trek road bike: full of air and slick, and also efficient, fast, and pretty much good for you. Quod erat demonstrandum.

Andy Stern, President of SEIU

If you ever want to make me sweat at a speaking engagement, why don’t you schedule me after one of the most eloquent writers of the day, followed by a preposterously telegenic, charismatic politician — and make me speak about labor unions. Well, that’s what Andy Stern did, and the man held his own quite well. He’s the President of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), and a seriously progressive thinker and doer.

I liked his framework of “3 major economic revolutions.” First, the agrarian one, took 3000 years, taking us from hunter-gatherer societies to settled farming ones. Next came the industrial revolution, which took about 300 years, moving the economic base to cities. And finally came the information revolution, moving the means of production from muscle to mind, from national to international. This one has taken a mere 30 years to change everything.

Since the subtitle of the conference was ‘voices from the near future’, Andy gave us a little preview of coming distractions:

– He declared employee-provided health insurance obsolete. In a global marketplace, you can’t have competitive products if you’re tacking on them the exorbitant price of healthcare when other countries aren’t doing that.

– Job-based pensions need to go. Witness the crippling of the American automotive industry.

–Pay will move to a merit- and performance-based system, especially in executive compensation.

Linda Avey & Anne Wojcicki, 23andMe.com

Here’s a cool idea I’m sure some of you have had ever since the human genome was first sequenced: sequence me! That’s what Linda and Anne have come up with — well, almost. The cost of sequencing all 3 billion base pairs in your no doubt fantastically interesting genome (”Omigod, my DNA spells GAG! And TAG! And GAGA! And my homeobox sequence is so much cooler than yours”) is still prohibitively high (on the order of $30k-$300K, or approximately 8 euro these days), so these cats do not sequence your entire genome. They’re way too smart for that. Instead, they chop up your DNA specimen (sent to them via spit sample in sleek tube) and then run it over a chip with over half a million different DNA sequences on it.  A sequence on the chip lights up when one of of your DNA bits sticks to it, and then a scanner can read it and enter the data into a computadora. Voila, now you know one of your SNPs — a single nucleotide polymorphism, which is a fancy way of saying one point at which your DNA is unique (a big deal, since we’re all >99.8% similar).

Okay, so far so good. Any lab monkey can do that. But now these guys have your DNA sequence and they hook it into a continuously updated database of genetic information. So whenever a new gene is discovered, a genetic disease figured out or some random factoid found out about your molecular instruction manual, you get an update. And you can noodle on your own Personal Genome Account and explore your genome, finally figuring out whether to thank mommy or daddy for your genius, charm and premature balding.

Well, not quite, since our genetic knowledge isn’t quite so advanced as to be able to nail down one SNP as responsible for one trait. Moreover, macroscopic traits (e.g. red hair, tall stature, inordinate fondness for pork rinds) tend to be multifactorial, so it’s going to be some more years before we figure out how genotype leads to phenotype. In the meantime, for a mere $1000, this is the ultimate gift for the man who has everything.

Must say that the whole venture seemed a bit far out, with a fuzzy business model at best and dubious sustainable competitive advantage (i.e. relatively easy to duplicate what they do). So how did it get funded? A clue was offered to me by one of my fellow attendees: apparently Anne Wojcicki, the younger of the 23andMe duo, last year married the World’s Most Eligible Bachelor — a certain Sergey Brin, cofounder of Google. I’ll let your unbridled speculation take over from there.

Eric Haseltine on new ways to fight bad guys

From the moment he starts talking, you know this guy’s brilliant — rapid delivery, quick sharp gestures, wide open eyes. Tall, slim, bald and 50ish, Haseltine’s a former Imagineer at Disney, he later became the Director of Research at the slightly less secretive National Security Agency, and then got other jobs about which he couldn’t tell us much. Which may explain why he only gestured and nodded during his talk.

Nah, talk he did. Haseltine opened with a reference to James Bond, that bulwark to all anti-Western baddies: “You know that guy who has all the gadgets in the James Bond movies? What’s his name, ‘Q’? Well, I’m Q.”

With some very clever slides, he demonstrated his point that the US intelligence community is like an elephant trying to fight swarms of mosquitoes. In response to the mosquito threat, the intelligence community decided to become an even better elephant — bigger ears, tusks, snout — whereas what it should have done is become a different kind of organism entirely. Like a mosquito-eating wasp, for example.

Haseltine highlighted the ascendancy of ideas over bits of data, and how outgunned we are in that domain by the likes of Bin Laden who successfully capture the hearts and minds of youth at an impressionable age. He was about to tell us how this approach can be used against the likes of Al Qaeda — and then went strangely silent again. “But get me drunk over lunch, and I’ll spill the beans. Just don’t tell my boss.” Never underestimate the power of Bud Lite.

Yoky Matsuoka: Neurobotics

The young director of the Neurobotics Lab at the University of Washington and a 2007 MacArthur Fellow, Yoky delivered the talk with the highest gee-whiz factor of the conference. I was so rapt that I barely took any notes. As its name implies, neurobotics is the marriage of robotics to neuroscience, allowing you to make prosthetics that are controlled by your own nervous system.

Yoky’s big project is the anatomical hand. Even the best robotic hands have rigid palms, which is not the way the human hand is designed. So she designed a robotic hand that closely mimics all the bones and joints in a real hand. The result is a hand with surprisingly lifelike motion and vast capability. It’s really uncanny to watch it actuated; you may want to go check it out on The New Yorker main site, where all the talks are posted.

The other idea she put forth was that of wearable sensors which track your nerve firing patterns. Say you’re hitting a golf ball, and you shank it. With the sensors, you can figure out the pattern of muscle contractions that led to said shank. That way, next time you’re on the golf course, you know exactly which muscle to blame when you shank it again (”Damn teres minor!”), thereby sparing your 5-iron from being bent into pretzel shape. Told you it was useful.

Amy Smith: Humanitarian engineering

Amy opened her talk with a clever little gambit: “How many of you had breakfast today?” A certain number of hands went up. “Okay, how many of you prepared your own breakfast?” Fewer hands stayed up (and by fewer I mean zero). “How many of you raised the grain that went into your breakfast? Walked 3 miles each way to a waterhole to bring water for your breakfast?” Yes, slackers all of us. We just moseyed over to the buffet. But, BUT — had we been given the option to go into the predawn light and the fresh morning air to gather the ingredients for our breakfast; to thresh the corn with our own hands and boil the well-water with the firewood we ourselves gathered; in short, to commune with nature and feel integrated into the cycle of life — we would probably still have taken the option to attack the bagels and lox at the buffet. Not to mention the grapefruit juice. Damn that stuff was good.

Boorishness aside, Amy showed us some cheap simple gadgets for making the hard life easier. The round plastic corn-thresher was incredibly easy to use and very cheap to produce. The charcoal briquet maker was also a hit, making cooking fuel more accessible and reducing the amount of soot villagers had to inhale.  Amy has invented many such low-cost, high-impact devices: a grain-grinding hammermill, an incubator that works without electricity, and a water-purification device amongst them.

The ‘living on $2 a day’ exercise that Amy assigns to her students was also a nice brain-tickle. Even if you only think about it for a few minutes instead of actually trying to live it for 10 days, the tradeoff between time and money in your life becomes immediately obvious. It also becomes easy to understand why poor people tend to stay poor when so much of their time is devoted to sustenance-related activities.

Michael Novogratz, finance honcho

I had never heard of Mr Novogratz before his talk. But let the record show that he is a sharp dresser. Then again, all of these finance moguls are sharp dressers — how can you not be when you can throw thousands of bucks at an outfit?

So allow me this opportunity to digress into a rant on men’s clothing. I don’t care how much you drop on your suit, mister — whatever you do, it’s still just a suit, and it’s still boring. And how are they different from each other anyway? Oh, right — lapel width. Wow. There’s a renegade for ya. Number of buttons. Look, we’ve got a rebel here with four-button suit — everybody take cover! Double-breasted vs. single-breasted — silly nomenclature for a silly style. And all these vestigial, perfectly useless (or at least poorly designed) features: buttons that don’t work (on the cuffs), pockets that are difficult to reach (designed for your daily commute on a horse), vents that don’t vent, buttonholes that aren’t holes (on the lapel), and general discomfort all around. And a shirt collar — what the heck’s that good for besides digging into your flesh and restricting bloodflow to your noggin? And don’t even get me started on ties — the single most ridiculous accessory known to mankind, a self-inflicted noose and interloper into your dinner dish. And the crazy part is that guys wear those ass tails on their necks and actually think they’re cool. Some future generation will see our insistent folly the same way we see those guys in the Rembrandt paintings with the bigass floofy collars around their necks that keep them from seeing their own feet (and other important body parts). Oh, and next time you’re examined by a doc who’s wearing a tie, ask him how many times he’s ever washed it. And how many patients he’s seen while wearing it.  The answer should be sobering.

Returning to our esteemed speakers and their ideas. Novogratz is a president of the Fortress Investment Group, “a global alternative-asset firm with over $40 billion of capital under management”, and was at Goldman Sachs for eleven years. He opened with this question about our current state of economic affairs: “Why did we get here?”

He started his story with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. He called this the beginning of globalization, with 400 million new economic players joining in the game from Eastern Europe, India and China. In 2003-04, globalization really heats up, and there is an unbroken rise in productivity from March ‘03 to August ‘07. Such productivity surges “end in revolution”, he remarked, because gains tend to accrue to the top of the pyramid, not to the bottom.

This was the most fascinating part of his talk: US individual incomes by percentile. To be at the 50th percentile of annual income in the US, you have to make $43,000. The 80th percentile is at $75,000. 95th percentile is $175,000, 99th percentile $750,000, 99.9th percentile $2.2m, and 99.99th percentile is $13m of annual income. At the 99.99th percentile — that means, at the level where your income is at the top 0.01% of the population — your wealth is accruing at a rate of 23% annually. To bring that into perspective, consider that the 23% increase equals $3.0 million in numerical terms — or $800,000 more than the piddling 99.9th percentilers make per year. Even at the very top, the wealth disparity is increasing at a fabulous rate.

Finally, Novogratz pointed out a megatrend worth pointing out: the US will become less and less economically relevant every year. This follows fairly logically from the fantastic growth in such places as India, China, Russia and the Gulf States, but as an American, it’s always hard to imagine losing our privileged place in the world. It’s happening now, so we may as well get used to the idea.

Robert Mankoff, cartoon editor of The New Yorker

This may have been the most fun talk of them all, partially because of Mankoff’s puckish sense of humor and because of the sample cartoons he put up, which I cannot reproduce for you here. But yes — not only is Mankoff funny in person, but he also takes humor quite seriously, if you know what I mean. He’s been participating in the University of Michigan’s Humor at Michigan program since 2004, exploring the social, cognitive and emotional aspects of humor. And he had the graphs to show for it.

One graph showed four straight lines of increasing slope fanning out from the origin. This was the ‘degrees of humor’ diagram. The lowest slope line was ‘close to normal’. A cartoon along this line would likely not elicit a chuckle, since, well, it’s too close to normal. The next line up is humor, within the realm of reality. Something here is discrepant, but still plausible, so we laugh. The next line up is absurdity (”The cop told me I was driving over 65 miles an hour.  I told him I’m not driving that long” — Steven Wright), which can still be funny. And beyond that, we get nonsense (”Mack chop egg bolt dry”), which is no longer funny.

Mankoff also touched upon two central elements of humor. “Humor involves diminishing things,” he said, and to illustrate his point, he showed a picture of Michelangelo’s David (not funny) followed by a cartoon of ‘Fat David’ (funny! — guess you had to be there). The other element of humor is incongruity — setting up the expectations of your audience, then thwarting it. I remember Edward de Bono talking about this in his seminal work Lateral Thinking. Laughter happens when you’re merrily chugging along from Point A, expecting to arrive at Point B any second now — and then you’re yanked via the unseen hand of humor to Point C, clearly not in Kansas anymore, and look back on Point B and have the insight, “Ah, I see how it’s possible to end up here!” Hilarity ensues. Case in point: Man walks into a bar. He says, “Ouch!” Point A is man walking into bar, Point B is to hear some standard bar joke, Point C is ‘ouch’, and the insight is that ‘walking into a bar’ is a pun. Almost any joke can be deconstructed this way, and rendered equally unfunny, so you really don’t have to try this at home. Jokes are like frogs — you dissect them, they die.

Paco Underhill, retail anthropologist

I had never met a black phalarope, xebu or retail anthropologist before, and this conference rectified one of those shortcomings.  And it’s quite possible that Paco Underhill is more interesting than that xebu or phalarope.  This is because he’s the author of Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping, and he’s studied the habits of Homo shopaholicus well.

Before launching into his rant on how poorly airports are designed, Paco discussed general trends in environmental design.  Visual language is evolving faster than verbal language nowadays, and it is being created by the dude in front of the CAD/CAM screen who is under 30 (while most of us are not).  The retail environment is also largely owned and designed by men, but women are expected to participate in it.  Also a curious point about real vs. perceived time in retail environments: people will inflate by 50% the amount of time they spend in a store.  Kind of like they do when they’re hypnotized.

One of the big shortcomings of airports, Paco remarked, was that we tend to build the physical infrastructure first, then overlay the information structure on top of it.  In a very information-intensive place like an airport, that can yield frustrating results.  For example, how many times have you gotten past security and walked up and down the terminal trying to find out which gate your flight departs from?  Clearly the designers of the building did not have in mind that actual travelers would be using this terminal.  How about putting gate information right outside so we see it as we drive?  Or right at the security checkpoint before getting into the terminal?  I have yet to encounter that in my travels.

Paco advocated studying what people actually do in an airport (apparently 50%+ use the bathroom and just about as many shop) and make the design amenable to those activities.  Profitability should then be commensurate with amenability.  The Underhill formula for good airport design, then, is something like Good Airport = physical design + information structure + operations.  He claimed that the new Terminal 3 at Beijing Airport built for the Olympics absolutely nails this.  Having flown out of there to Shanghai not too long ago, I can verify that not only is it a visually impressive structure, but my experience there in finding what I needed to find and getting where I needed to get (except for the part where the overly paranoid security automatons put my luggage through X-ray 3 times and confiscated my sunscreen because is was a 125ml container instead of a 100ml one) were quite pleasant.

Jane McGonigal: Saving the world through game design

Jane McGonigal is way cute.  With that out of the way, I can now tell you about her completely outrageous, brilliant gaming projects.  She opened her talk by positing that the historical function of games has been to solve a social problem and alleviate suffering.  For example, Herodotus mentions the 18yr Lydian famine and how people passed the time in the midst of crisis by playing games.  This has come all the way to today, where Massively Multiplayer (MMP) games such as World of Warcraft take up on average 24hrs/wk of those with enough cognitive surplus to engage in them.

She also discussed the economics of engagement and four components of happiness: satisfying work to do; experiencing being good at something; spending time with people we like; and being part of something bigger than ourselves.  Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) fulfill these criteria.  The last one she did was World Without Oil, which had 1500 worldwide participants imagining the first 32 weeks of a global oil crisis, and blogging about it.  The result, besides being just fun, was to raise consciousness about a potentially imminent crisis.

Her next project, created in the run-up to the (then) upcoming Beijing Olympics, was The Lost Ring, an elaborate mythopoeic conceit around the origins of the Olympic Games.  “The greatest mystery the world has ever known becomes the adventure of a lifetime,” intones the supremely well-produced 2-min trailer on the site, promoting an aura of secrecy and global intrigue.  And global it is, with 8 correspondents in multiple languages and an English-accented faux professor of Olympian history leading the participants to clues.  The game has wound down as of this post-Beijing writing, but you can still check out the site, which remains mighty cool.

Fareed Zakaria: The Post-American World

Apparently, Fareed’s a lot more popular than I gave him credit for, in part due to his frequent appearances on The Daily Show.  Not having a TV, I couldn’t tell ya.  What I can tell you is that he’s one suave dude.  He discussed some of the ideas in his book, The Post-American World, about how America is becoming less relevant on the planet.  Not necessarily because of the oft-cited trope of American decline, but rather because of the rise of so many other peoples: the Middle East (witness Dubai), India, China, and South East Asia.  He also had a couple of great lines, which I hope the Democrats put to good use: “John McCain has drunk the Neocon Kool-Aid… He’s doubling down on every bad bet George W. Bush has ever made.”

These were some of the best speakers and most stimulating ideas from the event.  If you have the time to make the conference next year, it’s well worth your while, and I hope to catch up with you there.

There are shiny airports, and then there are not-so-shiny airports. Airports tend to reflect the rest of the city. JFK is marginally shiny. LAX is shiny. Amsterdam’s Schiphol is way shiny. Heathrow is gleaming. GIG is not shiny. And Rio itself is great, but shiny it is not. In fact, I got a feeling that it disdained shininess.

The drive through Rio immediately reminded me of Tehran, another vast metropolis with upwards of 8 million people, lots of culture, and great disparities in wealth (the absence of half-naked people running through the streets at all hours is a subtle difference between the two cities). As we drove towards our condominium in Ipanema — about as far from the airport and downtown area as you can get — we went through the favelas, the slums made famous by movies like City of God (Cidade de Deus). I had imagined these shantytowns to be made of makeshift plywood and barrels, plastic sheeting and corrugated aluminum. But from where I sat, it seemed like they were all solid structures with running water and electricity — a cheaper alternative to city living, apparently with its own alternative druglord government (NB: Apparently the slums do get quite decrepit and nasty, but I have no firsthand reports). We went over bridges crusted with rust, through tunnels greeting us with a smudge of fine soot. Kind of like Boston or New York, South American style. Of course, it thrilled me to no end that that the tundra that is Boston and New York in February was over 7700 km (4800 mi) away.

Rome’s nickname is La Città Eterna. Paris is La Ville Lumière, Los Angeles is the City of Angels (all in hiding, apparently), and Rio de Janeiro is A Cidade Maravilhosa, which I translate as The Wondrous City, since ‘marvelous’ (like ‘awesome’) has lost some of its zing in English. The title of world’s most beautiful city will probably go to some other place, but Rio de Janeiro — pronounced HEE-oo juh zhan-AY-roo by the locals (Cariocas) — is blessed with much natural beauty, and is certainly full of marvels and wonders.

Baile de Copa
The word ‘carnival’ (and its Romance cognates, carnevale and carnaval) has its origins in the Italian word carnelevare — literally, the lifting or removal of meat. So the idea is basically, “Hey guys, this total buzzkill Lent thing is coming around the corner — no meat, no wine, no harlots for a while. So let’s party our asses off, like, now.” And that is precisely what the Brazilian nation does for a good month and a half preceding Lent.

In Rio, as part of the run-up to the Samba Parades, there are a series of pre-Carnaval balls. The most lavish of those is the Baile de Copa, held at the Copacabana Palace, which is either Rio’s most expensive or most famous hotel or both. By the suggestion of my friend Shane, I had plunked down for the not-insignificant ticket price (which, incidentally, was about twice what I had paid for Burning Man and the Corpus Christi May Ball at Cambridge, the two previous record-holders), since this was apparently The Place To Be in Rio During Carnaval Season. We fretted over our costumes — this year’s theme was ‘Carmen’, so we had to go Spanish-style — and after much diligent research by Shane and Phil happened upon a professional costume store on the day of the ball. The lady who owned the store was very experienced at her craft and sweet as sweet can be. She decked us out in the requisite garb: two Spanish noblemen circa 1850 and one flashy torero were now ready for the ball.

Until we got there, that is. This was much bigger than we had imagined. The rumors about all the Brazilian bigwigs being present must have been true, since there was an Oscars-style crowd of hollering fans ten-deep lining the fence that ran along the 80 yards of red carpet leading to the ball entrance. Since there weren’t any celebrities detectable to our gringo eyes, we just assumied that they must have been there for us. And maybe for Quincy Jones, too, the legendary music producer, who was just in front of us in line. I was shocked, shocked that he didn’t recognize me, but we shook hands and had a brief but pleasant exchange about the geopolitical climate in the Middle East, neo-imperialism, the recent proof of the Poincaré conjecture, the physics of iridescence in the genus Morpho butterfly, and how preposterously hot his daughters are. He really liked that part.

The red carpet at the Copacabana Palace

For better or for worse, the ball was indeed for Brazil’s upper crust, which meant that it wasn’t nearly as fun as an impromptu bloco party on the street. Sure, there was a samba band that would suddenly appear at the uber-sumptuous buffet and get everybody moving while noshing on blinis and oysters. There was unlimited free booze all night long, contortionists contorting and half-naked, buff dancers dancing flamenco and samba. But the median age was high and the zaniness subdued. I met some lovely people from Australia, London and Belgium, I did get a kick out of one of our companions’ having a dance with a striking individual of indeterminate gender (there are many, many of those in Rio for some reason), for which he will receive our eternal ribbing, hallelujah and amen. But we know that the height of the festivities would come some other time.

Life at the top of the food chain
Brazilian cuisine is relatively simple, composed of the starch and meat that the land provides in abundance. The classic dish is the feijoada, a stew made of vegetables, pig parts, sausage, what could be pig parts but you’ll never know for sure, and whatever’s left over in the kitchen from Tuesday night (it’s a traditional dish for Wednesday and Friday lunch, apparently). I passed on the two opportunities I had to sample the inchoate brown concoction due to the multiple UFOs (unidentifiable foodlike objects) in it.

However, I did partake of another authentic Brazilian food experience — the churrascaria. This type of restaurante (pronounced hest-ow-RUN-chee, the ultimate pronunciation test of Brazilian Portuguese) involves bringing a succession of yard-long skewers of grilled meat to your table, of which you can then accept or decline a juicy, dripping portion. The particular churrascaria we went to in Ipanema was a rodizio (prix fixe) place called Porcão — rather appropriately, a homonym for ‘poor cow’ and a near-homonym for ‘pork out’, which is exactly what we did.

The word itself means ‘big pig’, the aggrandizing -ão suffix in Portuguese being the equivalent of -one in Italian (e.g. porcone) or -on in French. The smiling Porcão mascot kept us company in the form of the initially cryptic coasters they had at the table with one side saying “Não obrigado” (no thanks) and the other saying “Sim por favor” (yes please!). The restaurant had a sumptuous all-you-can-eat buffet which all by itself would be more than sufficient to sate any bear: jumping-fresh sashimi and sushi, ceviche, oysters, salads, beets, hearts of palm, to name a few of the choices.

Of course, the mainstay of the Porcão experience is the skewered meat. Now, normally I don’t eat red meat at all, and since reading The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan, I’ve cut down on my intake of chicken and pork as well (you would, too — read the book). However, not eating red meat at Porcão would be akin to not taking the wafer at the Vatican Christmas Mass, or refusing ale at a London pub — a sacrilegious act. So I took the plunge and sampled nearly every cut of meat brought to us: flank; cheese-sprinkled flank; rump; sirloin; top sirloin; pork chops; suckling pig; chicken; cornish hen; baby back ribs; not-so-baby back ribs; chicken hearts; and a slice from that hump that some kinds of cows have on their backs. The nattily dressed waiters would come with the giant skewers and a very serious knife, announce the name of the cut, and proceed to slice off a sample and put it on your plate before you had a chance to refuse.

To this part-time carnivore, most of these cuts didn’t mean much to me. Luckily, I was sharing the meal with my travel companion Shane. Not only is he from Kansas City, where they take their steak very seriously, but his family has been in the cattle business for years. His uncle’s a butcher and his brother’s a cowboy. As such, he was eminently qualified to explain the subtleties of rump vs. flank vs. sirloin, “butcher’s cuts” (the less choice parts of the cow left over for the butcher to bring home), and the joys of eating one’s steak rare enough to hear the cow moo (”that’s when it’s got the most flavor”).

I must admit that as much as the dripping red meat did not appeal to my palate — way too chewy, for one thing — I did feel an atavistic draw to it. There’s something very elemental about biting into a hunk of cow on a skewer which appeals to that archaic part of the brain that knows that on the savannah, protein, fat and especially iron are rare commodities and should be reverentially consumed whenever found, so chow down that brown cow right now.

At some point I also became aware that these renamed and euphemized ‘cuts’ represented pieces of once-living animals. As one vegetarian friend of mine said, “all meat contains the energy of suffering.” He may have a point. At the same time, I take issue with fad diets like the raw food movement and veganism which seem to deny that, as omnivores, we have both incisors and molars, and that all animal life is sustained by consuming other life. And even if we only consumed plants, who’s to say they don’t have feelings, too? I discussed this briefly in the ‘Penguins’ post below, so if you already read the Kahlil Gibran quote from The Prophet there, you can skip over this iteration:

Would that you could live on the fragrance of the earth, and like an air plant be sustained by the light.
But since you must kill to eat, and rob the young of its mother’s milk to quench your thirst, let it then be an act of worship,
And let your board stand an altar on which the pure and the innocent of forest and plain are sacrificed for that which is purer and still more innocent in many.
When you kill a beast say to him in your heart,
“By the same power that slays you, I to am slain; and I too shall be consumed.
For the law that delivered you into my hand shall deliver me into a mightier hand.
Your blood and my blood is naught but the sap that feeds the tree of heaven.”

I do have a beef with beef, though. Corn-fed beef, specifically — 95+% of the beef sold in the US — is raised under inhumane, unsustainable and just plain unhealthy circumstances, as Michael Pollan makes clear in his book. You would do well to avoid it altogether for your own health and that of the greater ecosystem. Without getting into it too much, the cow’s rumen is a miraculous machine for turning grass into meat. However, it’s not designed for digesting corn at all, which is what the unsanitary factory farms feed the cows (in addition to fat supplements that come from the slaughterhouse — cow cannibalism at its worst). Corn acidifies the rumen to the point that it can ulcer and puncture, resulting in digestive tract bacteria getting into the cow’s bloodstream, necessitating large doses of antibiotics which eventually get into our bodies and help to breed resistant super-bacteria. Bad news. So — don’t eat corn-fed beef. Grass-fed is much more humane, healthier, and tastier to boot.

But back to the hestow runchee. Even though I did not consume the beefiest of the beef cuts, I did tally up a good number of members of kingdom Animalia in that one meal. In order of disappearance, they were: oyster, salmon, tuna, yellowtail, whitefish, some tasty nameless Amazonian fish, chicken, sheep, poor cow, and porcão.

On the way out, not ten paces from the restaurant, Rio reality hits you in the face again: a man of withered legs, no more than three feet tall, sleeping on the sidewalk with no earthly possessions in evidence other than the skateboard he scoots around on, which he is now using as a pillow. And a block away, a mother with two small children, trying to sell gum and candy. One night that I was locked out of the apartment, I wandered around my supposedly affluent neigbhorhood in Ipanema in the wee hours of the morn, and was struck by the number of people sleeping on the street: on chairs propped up against a storefront; at a bus stop; or just right on the sidewalk, with no covering and no piece of cushioning matter to intervene between soft body and hard ground. Moral outrage, especially directed towards oneself, is easy to summon in situations like these. But perhaps empathy and acceptance are even more empowering. As Lao Tzu said in Chapter 29 of the Tao Te Ching:

Do you want to improve the world?
I don’t think it can be done.

The world is sacred.
It can’t be improved.
If you tamper with it, you’ll ruin it.
If you treat it like an object, you’ll lose it.

There is a time for being ahead,
A time for being behind;
A time for being in motion,
A time for being at rest;
A time for being vigorous,
A time for being exhausted;
A time for being safe,
A time for being in danger.

The Master sees things as they are,
without trying to control them.
She lets them go their own way,
and resides at the center of the circle.

Formula 1 Cab Driving
Had anything prepared me for taking a ride in a Rio cab? Living in Tehran for over a decade was an adequate prelude, but the Carioca cabbies take urban driving to the next level. It doesn’t surprise me that legendary drivers like Nelson Piquet, Emerson Fittipaldi and Ayrton Senna are all Brazilian. For all I know, they must have cultivated their daring and utter fearlessness (tragic in the case of Senna) as cabbies on the streets of Rio.

There are some cities in which the lane markings have the status of a virtual wall. An unexpected or unannounced venture beyond the dotted line will very quickly earn you a disapproving honk in Los Angeles. In Boston, on the other hand, it’s more or less accepted that the lane markings serve as suggestion more than edict. In Rio, the markings pass from the realm of suggestion to mere decoration. The cab that brought us home from the airport straddled a lane line for about half the trip. He also demonstrated proper passing protocol inside a tunnel: get within inches of the bumper of the front car, flash your high beams repeatedly, then rapidly swerve left or right when you get a hint of an opening — and floor it, baby. Tudo bem.

That was in the daytime. My first night-time cab ride brought me another surprise: after sundown, stopping at red lights is entirely optional. In fact, if you do stop at a red light, you’ll get vicious honks from the road behind you. The guidebooks say that cars don’t stop at red lights at night because of the danger of carjacking and other crimes, and apparently there’s a lot of truth to that. But running red lights just seemed too consonant with the Carioca lazy-faire (ha!) spirit to have any reason beyond that. After the initial horror of your cabbie’s blowing through a dozen red lights at 100km/h, you get used to it, and start to think of it more as a blessing than a curse. After all, wouldn’t you love to be able to do that at home?

With Formula 1-style driving practiced by everyone on the road, optional traffic lights , and oblivious or suicidal pedestrians, you would think that there would be traffic massacres on Rio roads daily. Not so. During our 2 weeks there, we saw only one accident, and it wasn’t at an intersection.

There were also scary stories circulating: street gangs holding up buses at gunpoint and torching them with innocent passengers inside. Taxis in cahoots with the local police stopping at checkpoints where the cops ‘found’ drugs in the car, then shook you down for all the reais you had. Luckily, none of these things happened to us or anyone we know. As with any big city, Rio has nice places and not-so-nice places, and we tended to keep to the tried-and-true.

The Sambodromo
Carnaval in Rio is a Big Deal. There are 14 or so samba schools — which aren’t really schools but more like social organizations — that spend the better part of the year preparing for their big parade through the Sambodromo. And what is the Sambodromo, pray tell? Basically, if you took a gigantic stadium, snipped it in the middle and stretched it out, you’d get the Sambodromo (sam-BOH-dro-moo). It’s about a kilometer long and holds 100,000 singing, dancing, shouting spectators who are there to see the samba schools parade through.

And one hell of a parade it is. Each samba school has a theme, with 10-15 outrageous, over-the-top floats along the lines of that theme, and about 5000 dancers in indescribably complex feathered, mirrored, sequined and jewelled costumes. I’ll append some photos so you get a sense of what I’m talking about. Each school has 80min to get through the Sambodromo, so at the slow walking pace of 0.5-1m/s that the parade is moving, this makes each Samba school’s contingent about 2-4km (1.3-2.5miles) long. I told you it was a big parade.

My companions and I had arranged to participate in the parade of one of the more popular samba schools, Mangueira (literally, mango tree). The only way I can describe what I was wearing was Christopher Columbus meets Carmen Miranda crossed with a pineapple — gold brocade top, sheer breeches for the bottom, gold shoes, pink socks, big sash, green feather collar, fake-fruit handheld thing (never figured that one out), and 1-meter high lime-green feather headdress. The material was designed specifically to be unbreathable — some sort of bulletproof polyester, no doubt essential for the hazards of parading — which added an extra dimension of challenge to the endeavor: not to collapse of dehydration or heatstroke halfway through the 80min of dancing through the Sambodromo.

The theme for Mangueira was the mysteries of the Portuguese language and the origins of Brazil. We got ourselves to the pre-parade staging area at around 10.30pm for our 11.10pm start time, thinking we were mortally tardy, since the concept of ‘Rio time’ had not fully sunk into our consciousness yet. By the time we found our fellow Columbus Miranda pineapples, we had plenty of time to change, line up and meet the rest of the troops. Amongst the other travelers who had plunked down for the parade participation experience, there was a large Japanese contingent (perhaps related to Brazil’s having a large Japanese immigrant population). We were gratified by their preparedness, since they all had copies of the Mangeuira song, which we would all be singing about 3,578.4 times over the course of the 80min parade. My buddy and I crammed it and learned the first verse so as not to be completely left out. It goes something like this:

Vem no vira da Manguiera, vem sambar,
Meu idioma ten o dom de transformar
Faz no Palacio do Samba uma casa portuguesa
E uma casa portuguesa com certeza.

Which means something like this:

Come to the way of Mangueira, come samba,
My language has the power to transform,
Make in the Samba Palace a Portuguese house,
It is a Portuguese house for sure!

12.30am rolls around (i.e. 11.00pm Rio Mean Time), and finally it’s our turn to boogie our way into the Sambodromo behind the monstrous float of men in authentic Native American garb (translation: basically naked) straight out of the movie Apocalypto, riding a dozen hobbyhorses. We dance as best we can under the conditions, remembering the crucial turn to the left (or was it to the right?) at the beginning of the song, and checking out the denizens of the various real estate in the Sambodromo. Even to the untrained eye, a class system was at work here: at the top of the Sambodromo were the private boxes very close to the parade, full of good-looking people and sponsorship ads. As you went along, the route widened, and it was more stadium-style seating. This is where we ended up after finishing the parade and disposing of our costumes.

Click here to see clip from Sambodromo Parade, Rio de Janeiro, Feb 2007

Not that our seats were cheap. We each plunked down $130 to be in the scrub section, which makes you wonder how much those celebrity boxes must have cost. This brings us to the whole question of the socioeconomics of Carnaval. The samba schools are all based in the favelas — the slums of Rio. As such, all of the floats, all the dancers, everything comes from the favela. Now when you look at the floats, you can tell that someone put a lot of time, effort and money into them. Ditto for the costumes (which from firsthand experience I can tell you are not free). The capital from this grand endeavor comes from three sources: government funding; bucks from adventurous gringos like yours truly and the Japanese crew (who typically pay even more); and the drug trade.

As a result, it made sense why many of the Brazilians we met were from other cities. A large part of the population of Rio escapes during Carnaval time, partially to avoid the mayhem and principally to avoid rubbing shoulders with the unwashed masses. Carnaval is a big coming-out party for the favelas, and one of the only times when the classes mix. In a society with a wealth distribution even more asymmetric than that of the United States, this is a big deal.

Let’s also put the price of the Sambodromo ticket in perspective. At $130, the ticket represents about 4% of the $3340 per capita income of a Brazilian (according to The Economist Pocket World in Figures, 2007 Edition). For an American with a $39,430 annual per capita income, this would be like paying $1500 for a ticket. So I conclude that if the Sambodromo is packed to the gills with the common folk, it must mean a heck of a lot to them.

So after taking our expensive scrub stand seats, we settled in to watch the remaining samba schools and their awe-inspiring floats and costumes. The lady with the fireworks shooting out of her skirt was particularly memorable, as were the Star Wars float with the Stormtroopers and R2-D2s, “Where’s Waldo?” (”Where’s Wally?” for the rest of the world), and the painting of Adam coming alive and his jumping out of a gigantic Book of Creation. Neato.

By 4.30am, we were all floated out, bedazzled by the artistry and over-the-topness beyond mortal capacity (the party would go on without us to a full stadium until 8am). So we left the Sambodromo and hunted down a cab home — no mean feat — only to run into a big street party and concert in Lapa, in the heart of old Rio. You only live once, so we disembarked, got our second wind and kept it up till dawn, when a new band was just about to come on stage and the capoeira dancers, lithe and sweaty, were still practicing their craft. Only in Rio.

A day in Ipanema
I like açai (pronounced a-sa-EE). It’s like a supercharged Brazilian blueberry. Every morning — or more accurately, early afternoon — when we dragged our carousing butts out of bed, we would mosey down to the suco (juice) joint a block from the beach — trickily named Beach Suco — and pound down our morning fuel. This consisted of a rotating cast of juices — tangerine, pineapple, and kiwi so alive it bit you — and Brazilian-style dumplings. But açai was always the star. The juice is so thick that you need to eat it with a spoon, and supposedly it is the most potent antioxidant food known to man. After a half-liter cup of the stuff, you are pretty much immortal, not to mention rustproof. Not a spot of rust on my person on this entire trip, so I must say it works.

If we weren’t on a tourist mission in the daytime, the default setting was to amble over to Posto 9 on Ipanema Beach. The hallmark of the Ipanema beach experience was thus: thou shalt not go unaccosted for more than 60 seconds at a time. In that way, it was a microcosm of our entire Carnaval experience. A procession of enterprising folk come to sell you soda, cold beer, knick-knacks, temporary tattoos, those godawful Globo snacks which I never did dare try, grilled corn on the cob (yum), and caipirinhas that the guidebooks warn against unless you are a fan of acute gastric distress, which is not cute at all. During our minute-long hiatuses, we would watch the most impressive array of rippling, active bodies I have ever seen — yes, even more so than in Los Angeles. The ‘cult of the body’ that I had heard about so often now made perfect sense. And yes, at any hour of night or day, there are joggers and cyclists along the beach path. Most intriguing was the physics-defying game of foot volley — basically like beach volleyball, but without using your arms at all. With ingenious use of their heads, shoulders, chest, knees and feet, these guys would not just keep the ball in play but set up plays, feint, and spike the ball. Maravilhosa indeed.

Upon our return, the streets were usually filled up with revelers. But hadn’t it been filled with revelers before we left? Yes it was. But the mix changed depending on the neighborhood, and our particular one seemed to be close to a gay nexus. As such, the sight of boys making out with boys, girls making out with girls, and occasionally, boys making out with girls, was fairly common.

That was one thing that was noticeably different about Brazilian street parties: people liked to kiss each other. A lot. This partially has to do with sexual mores in Brazil, which are decidedly different from the US, and also with the life-affirming nature of their culture. American culture seems to titillate while denying satisfaction. Thou shalt see the beckoning, scantily dressed woman in the ad, but thou shalt not want her but should rather want to buy more stuff. Thou shalt flirt, but desire for consummation shall bring you damnation eternal amongst fire and brimstone (what the hell is brimstone anyway?) not to mention immediate rejection and ridicule.

Not so in Brazil. It turned out that when a woman flirted with you and continued to flirt with you, she was actually interested in you. Crazy but true. And this interest could soon escalate into kissing or a night of grown-up entertainment, that same night or maybe the next day. I witnessed this time and time again, and my companions were the gratefully bewildered recipients of this straightforward largesse. Moreover, these women were genuinely sweet and caring in a way that I just haven’t seen in the States. While in the US, people busy themselves chasing down the symbols of joy — money, status, career advancement — while starving from a real lack of actual joy, the Brazilians, most of which have little access to money or status, were busy affirming life in all its dimensions, enjoying their food, their drink, their bodies, and their dancing.

The ultimate irony was that 10 days into the trip, all of us were ready to go back home. As Prince Hal said in Shakespeare’s Henry IV, “If all the year were playing holidays/ To sport would be as tedious as to work.” And as much as the culture of life affirmation enchanted us, the perpetual party ran up against my strict Protestant upbringing, and we needed to go work hard and produce, dammit, so we could properly deserve the next adventure. And every trip reminds me of these lines from the coda to T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets:

“We shall not cease from exploration,
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.”

A couple of nights ago, I had the pleasure of seeing The March of the Penguins,
the acclaimed Luc Jacquet documentary.  The screening room at the
William Morris agency did the sweeping Antarctic vistas and majestic
aerial shots of the movie justice, and some friends were on hand to
share the experience.  If you haven’t seen the movie, it follows
the breeding ritual of the emperor penguin, one of the few animals that
makes its home on Antarctica (where I hear beachfront real estate is
still eminently affordable — buy before everyone else catches on to
this whole global warming thing). 

The story goes something like this.  Towards the end of the
Antarctic summer, penguins rocket out of the water and start a
migration en masse to the breeding grounds where they were born. 
Now penguins are pretty picky about their real estate.  Because
they will be particularly vulnerable during this time, they need to be
far away from predators.  They also need to be in a place where
the ice is thick enough that it doesn’t crack or melt under them. 
And the breeding grounds also need to be somewhat sheltered from the
unforgiving Antarctic winds that can blow as hard as 160km/hr and
create a windchill of -50 centigrade.  For these reasons, and many
others known only to the penguins themselves, these breeding grounds
are 80-100km away from the water’s edge. 

Now let’s think about that for a second.  A penguin is about 60cm
tall.  It has really short legs, and basically can only
waddle.  Like in Los Angeles, there is no public transportation in
Antarctica, and taxis are hard to come by.  So the penguins travel
the length of 2-3 marathons,
just waddling along or scooting themselves endearingly on their
bellies, for the better part of a week (or two).  There are no
fast-food stores along the way offering fresh krill or mackerel. 
They carry no luggage.  There are no motels.  The don’t
complain — they just go.  And, most remarkably, there are no
roads or street signs — just the barren sweep of white ice, with its
crevasses, slopes, glaciers and ever-shifting surface features. 
No one has figured out how the penguins navigate to their ancestral
breeding grounds, but they’ve been doing it for thousands of
years.  Their existence is testimony to the effectiveness of
whatever natural GPS they have. 

One of the craziest shots of the movie is that of the lines of penguins
from different parts of the Antarctic shore marching in tidy single
files and converging like spokes of a wheel upon one breeding ground,
all of them within a day or two of each other.  Besides the
navigation system, apparently these hardy souls must also have some
highly accurate system of telling time that no one has figured out either.

Once the penguins have assembled on the breeding grounds, they start
looking for a mate.  All the penguins look pretty much identical
to me, but apparently they know what they’re looking for, and wandering
a while amidst the cacophony of mating calls, they pair up (there are
fewer males than females, so not all of them do).  They mate as
the male fertilizes the single egg, and the process of genetic
recombination that has kept sexually-reproducing organisms one step
ahead of their parasites and is ostensibly the whole purpose of the
100km trek takes place. 

Now this is where things get interesting.  The couple now has to
wait for the egg to get laid.  Seems like this takes about a month,
during which time they do — pretty much nothing.  They just sit there, with
no food in sight.  Still, no complaining (then again, I don’t
speak Penguin).  Every day, the temperature drops and the days get
shorter, until the worst of Antarctic weather is upon them.  So
they press together in a big huddle to protect against the driest,
coldest, windiest climate on earth, shuffling around in a highly
organized fashion, regularly rotating in the penguins from the outside
fringes to the inside of the huddle where it’s warmer.  It’s
completely mind-boggling to watch this — almost as much as imagining
what the camera crew must have gone through to get these astounding
shots.

And then, the egg is laid.  It sits on top of the female’s
claws, behind a sheet of skin on her belly, protected under her feathers from the
harsh elements.  But now for the crux of the affair:
the female has now lost about a third of her body weight to create the
egg, and must trek back to the ocean to feed, or
otherwise perish.  She also must bring back food for the ravenously
hungry soon-to-be-newborn chick.  So before she can leave, the
female must execute an intricate dance of transferring the egg from her
pouch to the male’s.  If the egg rolls off and stays out for more
than 30 seconds or so, it freezes instantly to rock-hard lifelessness
in the -50C air.

As an aside, another mind-boggling thing is how the penguins find one
another again when they come back and find a mass of thousands of
identical-looking species.  Apparently emperor penguins really do
all look alike, even to one another, and the way they find each other is
through voice.  It’s amazing to see how in the midst of the
cacophony of thousands of penguin calls all blending into each other,
one penguin actually finds the other.  Then again, you and I
can identify a friend’s voice on the phone from just a couple of
syllables, so the penguin brain must have gotten very good at a similar task.

If the transfer is successful, the female waddles off to the shore,
which is now several kilometers farther away because of the formation
of new ice.  The females are literally starving, and some of them
never make it to the shore, or get killed by predators, in which case
the chick perishes, too.  In this movie, they get this sweet
underwater shot (those waters are cold)
of a leopard seal, lying in wait for the arriving penguins, and somehow
manage to capture the seal’s successful hunt.  The movie is
structured as a story, and if the penguins are the heroes, then the
leopard seal, of the wide-open jaw of menacingly sharp teeth,
mercilessly killing a mommy penguin (and by extension, its unborn chick)
is defnitely the villain (as is a single petrel, in a cameo
appearance).  The soundtrack insinuates the permeation of an evil
miasma in the penguin’s otherwise peaceful home and restaurant (da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM), and the
audience audibly gasped when they saw the penguin nabbed.  But the
seal’s not evil — it’s just being a seal.  And it’s probably
taking the food home to feed a cute little baby seal.  And on the
way home, it may get nabbed by another predator itself (maybe a
human).  And we’re not telling the story of the krill and the
fish, but the penguins are eating somebody’s brother, son, daughter or
mom, too.  It’s just the way things are.  So let the eating
of food be a humble celebration of our place in the cycle of being (and
all you vegetarians who think that plants are less alive than animals
may wish to reconsider).  The movie sequence reminded me of the
chapter “On Eating and Drinking” from Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet:

“Would that you could live on the fragrance of the earth, and like an air plant be sustained by the light.

But since you must kill to eat, and rob the young of its mother’s milk to quench your thirst, let it then be an act of worship,

And let your board stand an altar on which the pure and the
innocent of forest and plain are sacrificed for that which is purer and
still more innocent in many.

When you kill a beast say to him in your heart,

“By the same power that slays you, I to am slain; and I too shall be consumed.

For the law that delivered you into my hand shall deliver me into a mightier hand.

Your blood and my blood is naught but the sap that feeds the tree of heaven.”

To summarize the rest of the story, the mom gorges up in the ocean,
comes back to feed the hatchlings, and in the second crux of the story,
the chick is transferred from the dad’s belly pouch to the mom’s (and
if they don’t do it quickly enough, the chick freezes to death before
their eyes), and the dad trudges off to the ocean after 4 months of
starvation, so then he can
gorge and come back and feed baby. So if you thought that one
triple-marathon was remarkable, think again: the penguins end up doing
it about a dozen times, for a
total of about 9 months until the chick has enough protective feathers
and can walk on its own.  By now, the ice has melted enough such
that the ocean is just a few hundred yards away, and the penguin chicks
start life on their own for the 5 years before they make their own
pilgrimage to their birth site.

So what is the point of this all?  The penguins endure
unimaginable hardship to make this march and breed so they can make
more penguins that grow up to be old enough to endure unimaginable hardship to make this march and
breed so they can make more penguins…  It seems that life is the
ultimate circular argument, and like the famous phrase “This statement
is false,” it defies examination or any attempt to make sense of
it.  Maybe Kurt Godel would have said life is an undecidable
proposition — there’s a new book on him and the Incompleteness Theorem
by Rebecca Goldstein entitled, trickily, Incompleteness. 
I like Alan Watts’ formulation of the meaning of life: he says life is
meaningless not in the sense that it lacks purpose, but rather in the
sense that it is meaning.  If I say the word apple,
or draw a picture of an apple, it’s a representation, a referent to an
actual apple.  Once you have that actual Fuji apple that you can
hold, smell and bite into, it doesn’t have any meaning beyond it — it is
the meaning.  You do not seek the meaning behind an apple — you
celebrate it and eat it.  And you do not seek the meaning behind
life — you live it. If you’re a fan of the circular argument, maybe
you’ll like what I heard some wise man recently say: “The purpose of
your life is to find your purpose.”  And in the same way that the
computer will never know how it came about and who its creator is, so
we simply do not have access to the mind of the universe and why we are
here, if there is any why at all.  In the meantime, a state of
perpetual celebration sounds fine by me.  Who’s bringing the Riesling?

As with all trips, there was some pre-departure hesitation
before leaving for my cousin’s wedding in Costa Rica last week.  Right at that metaphorical threshold which
has “Go” on one side and “Stay” on the other, all the
demons of habitude and hebetude rise from the nether regions of the psyche and
insinuate themselves into your internal dialogue with such profound
pronouncements as “Dude, it’s gonna cost you money”, or “It’s
going to be so different — you sure
you want that?”  The tautological
reasons, even though they generally come under the “It’s a feature, silly,
not a bug” heading, seem strangely compelling at the moment you’re about
to plunk down hundreds of hard-loaned bucks and several days of life for what
is basically a deliberate venture into the unknown.  For such occasions, it’s handy to have a rule
to live by (rules being, in my book, what you use only when common sense
fails).  My rule is simple: When in
doubt, go.  So go I did. 

The 1.05am departure from LAX arrived in San Jose’s
Juan Santamaria Airport to a blazing 8am sunshine through crisp skies,
resulting in an industrial-strength reset of my circadian clock by a solid 2
hours.  The airport is named after the
wily drummer boy who torched the wooden fort where the crazed invader William
Walker had taken refuge in February 1856. 
Walker fled as a result, Costa Rica was saved — and the boy
perished.  A big bronze statue right at
the airport’s entrance commemorates his bravery.

It turned out that I would need a dose of his bravery sooner
rather than later as I tried to figure out how to get to Quepos/Manuel Antonio
from where I was standing next to the statue. 
Quepos is 3.5 hours away from the San Jose airport, and there are many
ways to get there, ranging from the costly ($100/person for private shuttle),
to the reasonable ($53 each way on a commuter plane), to the dirt cheap ($4.60
on the bus).  I decided that the bus was
the way to go, partially because it seemed like the scenic route and also the
way to get a taste of how locals live (I also wasn’t aware of the other modes
of transport until later, but work with me here).  You’re either a traveler or a tourist, and
the traveler always chooses lumpiness.

Traveler tendencies notwithstanding, the biological
imperative of sleep knocked me out for most of the bus ride in spite of the
tight confines, rumble of the diesel engine and general bumpitude.  Luckily, I was wide awake when we were
crossing a river way down thar on this bridge remarkable for being made
entirely of rust.  This was definitely
not a pomegranate-juice guzzling kind of bridge.  As the words “Ohhhh my god”
unconsciously passed over my lips while looking down, I had a renewed
appreciation of the meaning of faith (i.e. you’re stuck — deal with it, buddy).  Luckily, with the help of the copious concern
rays sent from my forehead, the bridge held up just fine.  And I didn’t even ask the rest of the bus
passengers to thank me — safe passage was its own reward, hallelujah and
amen.  Later I found out that the expats
in the area (and some of the locals) actually call it the Oh My God Bridge.

Eventually I found the way to my small, brand-spanking new
hotel right at the entrance to Manuel Antonio National Park.  Mike, a former attorney from Los Angeles,
opened up La Posada Jungle in April 2005, and its amenities, cleanliness and
reasonable price already make it a favorite with the guidebooks.  La Posada even has its own dedicated troupe
of white-faced capuchin monkeys who dropped by daily around 3pm to hang around
(ha) and perhaps score some bananas from us. 
Look the place up at www.laposadajungle.com and tell ‘em I sent ya. 

Every trip has its own character, even when you’re going to
a repeat destination.  My first time in
Costa Rica in December 2001 was a more circumscribed affair, centered around a
weeklong retreat where we didn’t have to touch any money.  So this second swing was bound to give me a
better sense of the economics of living in the country.  I’ve found that two of the best measures of
the true cost of living in a place (especially when surrounded by tourist
traps) are the cost of public transportation and the price of a bottle of domestic beer. 
For example, a subway ride in Oslo or London will set you back over $4,
an accurate reflection of the top-5 ranking of those two cities on the worldwide
cost-of-living index.  A bus ride in
Manuel Antonio or Quepos will set you back 105 colones — just over 20 cents
($1 is about 500 colones). 
And a bottle of local brew comes in under a buck — usually 50
cents.  By comparing an equivalent basket of goods in two
different countries, you can arrive at the purchasing price parity
(PPP), which is the real measure of how strong your shekels are.  The Economist
uses the Big Mac Index, comparing the price of the highly effective
atherosclerosis-promoting agent in countries that have it (by that
token, Switzerland is the most expensive and Malaysia the least). 
I prefer the versatility of the Bus & Beer Index.

By that standard, you realize that a cab ride, at 1500
colones, is a bona fide luxury.  And that
the fancy resorts catering to well-heeled gringos are charging per night more
than a local earns in a month.  One night
a guide took us to a restaurant with no sign and seven tables that only locals
went to.  They fed us enormous plates of
rice, beans, fried plantains (platanos)
and mahi mahi so fresh it almost bit back. 
The whole meal, including booze and extra portions, set us back
$44.  For eleven people.  The attempts
of the proprietor to give us back the $6 tip we had left was particularly
telling — who would do such a thing?  Surely they must have forgotten their change. 

Once you find out how far your almighty buck really goes in
this part of the world, two things happen: an expansion and a contraction.  What expands is your sense of possibility –
I can do so much!  I can order everything
on the menu and get really fat!  What
contracts is your sense of generosity and trust.  Now that you know the true price of a cab
ride, woe betide the cabbie who asks for 500 colones more than the norm.  The fact that you probably would not have
given a second thought about dropping that buck as a tip for an overpriced,
underfortified drink somewhere on Sunset Boulevard has no bearing on the
matter: your brain has readjusted to the new value of things.  And you will look askance at that
establishment that has the temerity to charge five whole dollars for a margarita, the blasted opportunists. 

The local government has been quick to pick up on such
things, knowing that foreigners will not bat an eyelash if asked to pay $7 for
entrance to the national park (as well as a $20 Departure Tax upon leaving the
country).  And the fact is, for the
opportunity to immerse oneself in the lushness of nature such as is found in
Costa Rica, any price is a bargain.  A
boat ride through the mangrove swamps, a zipline tour through the forest
canopy, a hike through the rainforest, all bring you back to where you belong:
realizing that you are one organism amongst many, in intimate codependence with
your surroundings.  On the last night of
the trip, as I was grilling a huge mahi mahi that one of our friends had
caught, more than a few mosquitoes took advantage of my distraction and feasted
on my skin.  Had I not been there, what
would have become of them, the poor little bloodsucking bastards?  While I was scarfing down the fish, they were
feasting on me, and I was happy to occupy my ecological niche, fully integrated
into the circle of life.

What nature does really well and humans don’t do
as well is to maintain balance in this circle of life.  Feedback loops
adjust excess with deficiency.  As humans, our cleverness and
aversion to discomfort allows us to come up with feedback-free
solutions to excess that often involve more excess.  For example, one
thing that was thoroughly emphasized in the guidebooks was the dictum Thou shalt not feed the monkeys. 
The reasoning is clear: our germs contaminate them, our barbecue-spiced Cheetohs are
bad for them, and even too much of harmless food can make them lazy and
aggressive.  Capuchin monkeys are very quick learners: the first banana
treat may surprise and delight them, but a second one establishes a
pattern, and by the third one they will come to expect and demand what
was once a favor.   Of course people still want to feed the monkeys,
because they’re so cute, and
it’s the highlight of the trip, with the predictable result that the
monkeys have all formed street gangs, wearing bandannas and having
nicknames like El Gordo (Fatso) and Papi Mono (Studmonkey). Give up that banana like, now, buddy, or else they will beat you up.

But I digress.  In a parallel fashion, the influx
of fat tourists waving around their luscious dollars and euros probably
has an effect on the local populace.  As I was sitting at one of the
expat-owned bars, another expat enumerated the local fauna for me:
those two over there in the miniskirts are prostitutes; that guy in the
greasy long hair is a drug dealer; and that other guy on the bench can
get you crack.  In Manuel Antonio, you can get any drug you want in 15 minutes flat.  I’m
guessing the phenomenon is not particular to this one beach resort
town.  But it does make me wonder what it all must have been like
before the arrival of tourism en masse.  The good news is that the
infrastructure is reasonably good (save the legendary roads with the
man-eating potholes) in balance with a natural beauty that Ticos take
great pride in and steward well.  Perhaps Costa Rica will be kept in
pretty good shape after all.  In the meantime, why wait –  now is an
excellent time to go visit.  Here’s one reason why:

Pura Vida, December 2001

This, too, is a dark place:
The verdant hills, terraced and bejeweled
With red droplets of drunken vivacity,
Umbrella plants, mountain mangroves,
Iridescent flutters and a riot of life -
For all its light, it remains the belly of the unknown.
Yet, in a few days, the mind succeeds
In imposing a regime of familiarity,
The landscape and language a ghost-image
Assembled from lives past:
It is the Earth in other dress.

No map.  Seven days of solitude
Amongst seventy kindred spirits
(Will I accept them?  Will they accept me?
Will we accept ourselves?).
Perhaps here I will find something.
Perhaps here I will lose something more 
Amidst the promise of pure life.
Order imposed upon time, limb and breath
Foments miniature rebellions
That die within the space of a sigh.

Meandering the jungle path
In the exhilaration of exhaustion,
I see that the darkness and light
Have the same source: the war,
Love and famine raging in this belly,
My fire to cherish, relinquish and cherish again,
And to illumine each step I take:
With the world in my heart,
Home is wherever I go. 
– Dec 2001

In
retrospect, the highlight of the trip came at an unexpected time. After
a long morning hike through Manuel Antonio National Park, I was
dragging my tired, thirsty, hungry carapace back to town when I met
this enterprising young fellow right at the park exit.  And what
did he have?  Coconuts — kept chilled in his styrofoam
cooler.  “Dame un frio,” I said — make it a cold one, buddy. 
He reached into the depths of the cooler and fished out an ice-cold
specimen.  With a few skilled hacks of his machete, he whittled
down the top of the shell to a thin membrane that a straw could poke
through and handed nature’s chalice to me.  The first sip of that
watery, sweet, infinitely refreshing treat, that downpour on the
desert, lit up every cell in my body as they all tingled and sang a big
chorus of aaaaahhhhh.  I walked back to town, residing for a few moments in the imperturbable bliss of simple things.

    It all
started innocently enough.  I was having
a little promenade on the Promenade here in Santa Monica when I saw the shop
window.  At first I tried to ignore it,
but resistance was futile.  Slowly, the
decidedly straight path my feet were on turned into an arc, like an electron
deflected by a magnetic field, as some mysterious force drew me towards the
front entrance.  Oh no, not again — I
had just promised myself last week that I was going to lay off for a
spell.  Go cold turkey.  Force of will.  And I had been doing so well.  But I saw the wares in the shopfront, in all
their seductive shapes and colors, and before I could muster up some
resistance, my feet had already taken me inside the store and planted me in
front of a big pile of the intoxicating merchandise.  And there I was, inexorably drawn into its sphere of influence, touching the stuff that was
my downfall, first one item,
then another, then another.  I was in its
thrall.  I surrendered to the instinct
and decided to bask in the visceral pleasure of the moment and to worry about
the guilt later.  Always later.  Thirty minutes later, I walked out with three
more books I didn’t need.  I hate
bookstores.  And love ‘em.

            My name is
Ali.  And I am a bookaholic.

            Oh sure,
there are euphemisms for it.  Avid
reader.  Collector.  Information junkie.  Book connoisseur.  Scholar. 
Researcher.  And my favorite,
bibliophile, which practically makes a virtue of the condition.  But we all know what it really is: a disease.  An inner urge that cannot be conditioned
out.  A hunger for acquiring large
collections of symbols inked on slices of dead tree, and perhaps feeding them
someday to the ravenous retina, even when that retina is attached to a brain
that knows that there is not enough time in the world to even glance at those
slices for a second at a time. 

            See, I’m
not one of those people who’s hung up on how rare the book is, what condition
the binding is in, whether there’s an inscription by the author and all that
kind of nonsense.  You can take all your
first editions and stick ‘em where the sun don’t shine (but you probably do
that already so they won’t dry out or bleach or lose value or whatever — hey,
as long as you can still sit down comfortably). 
I care about the data.  The glyphs
between the covers that tickle the cerebral cortex out of its threatened
hibernation.  Words, poems, maps,
recipes, algorithms, how to, how not to, the way it was, the way it should be,
the story, the scoop, the stuff you were afraid to ask about, the irreverence,
the blasphemy, the orthodoxy, the keys to the kingdom.        

            Sometimes I
joke that if I could have one superpower, it would be infinite reading
speed.  I could walk into Widener
Library, and zip!  Done.  The entire collection, eight stories deep,
would download to my brain.  Hey, that’s
a great idea.  You Google folks — get on
it already.   

            I remember
the feeling I had that very first time I walked through the stacks of Widener
Library, six stories underground.  There
were all these musty volumes on philology, philosophy, medievalism, and scores
of other obscure and therefore utterly fascinating subjects.  Walking amongst and leafing through them
filled me with exhilaration — the knowledge of the ages, conversations with
the dead, records of human folly and vanity, fields discovered, cultivated and abandoned,
secret knowledge sitting out in the open, all there for me.  And it gave me an equally breathless despair:
the certainty that I would never read all of these books, that if I spent the
rest of my natural existence to the ripe-old age of 95 reading 8 hours a day every
day books that take on the average 6 hours to devour, I would get through about
35,000 of them, and there were six million in that library alone, so one half
of one percent of them is the best I could hope to do, so the Hindus had better
be right about reincarnation, and it had better not be as a cockroach that I’m
coming back either, unless it’s a super speed-reading cockroach. 

            There is a
touching faith amongst bookaholics that, given the time constraints of earthly
existence, the mere act of buying a book is a good enough proxy for mental
acquisition of its information content. 
If the spine of that book shows on your bookshelf, you’re more than
halfway there.  It’s the intention that
counts, right?  But having read enough of
those books, we know that this isn’t really true, and so are plagued by the two
demons of the professional information hoarder: the limits to acquisition speed
and retention.  If only we could read
fast enough, then we could get through all the books.  And if we could remember everything that we
read, we’d be super-genuises in the league of Wile E. Coyote. 

            In order
to solve these problems of book-reading, I have resorted to — you guessed it
– more book-reading.  Which is a little
bit like returning to a hospital to treat the nasty infection you got from
visiting that same hospital.  Or buying box wine to fix that Scotch habit.  (Incidentally,
if you catch something at a hospital, it’s called a nosocomial disease; if you get it from visiting a doctor, it’s
called iatrogenic.  Ain’t medical factoids great?  But I digress.  But I’m good at digressing, so lay off
already.)  First, I went after the whole
speed thing.  If I just doubled my
reading speed, I could theoretically get through 70,000 books — bucking up
against the Widener 1% line.  Traditional
speed reading tells you to scan faster, catch words with your peripheral
vision, take in groups of words instead of single words.  All admirable and eminently practical
advice.  Speed increased somewhat, but
nothing to make my reading electron jump to the next orbital.  I needed something more revolutionary than
that.  Not just an Aston Martin to my
Toyota, but a Learjet.

            So a few
years ago, I stumbled upon what seemed like the solution: Photoreading, a system developed by Paul Scheele.  The claim was that the system would enable me
to read at a page a second.  I could not
have been more thrilled, so I bought that book of the same name with the aim of
deploying the system.  It involves
previewing the book to create a mental outline, then adopting a certain visual
and quasi-meditative mental focus while scanning the book two pages at a time,
one to three seconds per page.  Then you
sleep on it, come back the next day, and magically, mysteriously, all the
information would be in your mental hard drive after a certain ‘activation’
procedure.  Now I had seen the TV
infomercials of that fellow Howard Berg and his 30,000 word per minute
world-record reading speed with 90% comprehension, and also those little
courses in The Learning Annex along the same lines, so I was open to the
possibility that this could work.  I did
get some improvement in my reading speed, although not at the gigahertz
processor speeds the course had promised. 
Paul Scheele and company are still in business seven years later (and I
even paid to see him speak a few weeks ago right here in Los Angeles), so he
must be doing something right.  And, full
disclosure: I didn’t follow the system to the letter.  But my quest for Infinite Reading Speed
clearly had to go on.

            On to the
retention problem then.  I remember taking
a class on Japanese culture and history in college, and the only things I can
remember from it are that the Meiji Restoration happened in 1868, and that what
Americans call hara-kiri was actually
called seppuku in Japan (gory details
seem to stick better in the memory).  And
you know what?  I paid a lot for that
class.  I’m still paying for that class, so this whole impermanence of memory
thing was simply not acceptable.  To the
bookstore!  Luckily, Mnemosyne, the Greek
muse of memory, was already on the case and had a whole shelf of books (mmm,
more books) ready for me.  A cursory glance
at said shelf yields that a certain Tony Buzan is the reigning king of
information on learning and memory.  So I
got his book Use Your Perfect Memory,
and you know what?  It rocks.  It gives you all these techniques for applying
your mind’s natural storage abilities to various classes of information,
dramatically improving your long-term retention.  Phone numbers, lists, faces and names, dates,
all become a piece of cake.  General
guidelines for improving retention were also useful.  Emotion adds to the stickiness of
information, so add it in.  Pour on sound,
color and flavor to things to make them more memorable.  Do you know where all the stuff in your bedroom
is?  Of course you do, because the brain
is good at organizing information spatially, so use that feature (described as
the Roman Room system, where you imagine each piece of information sitting in a
certain location in a house).  Stories,
rhyming, outrageousness and music are good mnemonic aids, as are handwriting
information and reviewing notes immediately after taking them down. 

            There were
other books, too: SuperLearning,
which partially talked about the Lozanov method of using 60 beats-per-minute
background music and a certain rhythm while reading.  And there are documented claims of people
with photographic (or eidetic) memory, although I’ve never met a person who has
it.  Their existence gives me hope that
some of their mental strategies — like those of patient S. in Luria’s Mind of A Mnemonist — can be duplicated
by those not born with the gift.  If you
know ways of reading faster and retaining more that actually work, drop me a
line — I’m all ears. 

So this quest, too, continues.  Recently I read an article about how sleep is
essential to the consolidation of memory. 
I never thought of my incredible napping powers as a deliberate
technique, so that’s fantastic news.  In
the meantime, I went through my shelves and came up with this partial list of
books-in-progress (if it’s on the shelf, that means, I’ve touched it, so it’s
in progress, okay?  Okay).  A way to think about it is that each one is
its own relationship.  There are the
“marriage material” books that have been sitting patiently on the
shelf while a couple of more glamorous books (well, alright, dozens of them)
have jumped the queue and gotten read before them (”But they’re long forgotten,
honey, and you’re still around — shouldn’t that count for
something?”).   You know these books
are good for you, but they may not be all that fun to get through.  Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective People goes in that category,
which I picked up again yesterday (to find that the airport receipt within was
from February 1997 — nice).  There are
the “fling” books.  This is
usually light reading that captures your attention quickly, gets read quickly,
and you part ways, hallelujah and amen, good times, no hard feelings.  Dan Brown’s Angels & Demons falls in that bin.  Then there are the “project” books
– books that require so much deliberate effort that you almost have to alter
your lifestyle to get through them.  Goedel, Escher, Bach by Hofstadter and
Dennett is one of those for me, as well as Ulysses
and Finnegan’s Wake if I ever get
around to them.  And let us now praise
the “midnight lover” (also referred to as the booty call in street parlance). 
These are books that you can go to for a quickie every once in a while,
since they have self-contained modules that are good for a temporary
pleasure.  Mind Hacks by Stafford and Webb, a book about tricks you can play
on your own brain, is one of these, as is The
48 Laws of Power by Greene and Elffers. 
Funny thing is how some booty call books have a tendency to
insinuate themselves into your life for the long-term.  The Tao
Te Ching and Kahlil Gibran’s The
Prophet, volumes that I revisit often and quite possibly my two favorite
books of all time, both started out that way. 

    But enough about the taxonomy of cellulose
girlfriends.  Here’s a partial list of
them books on the conveyor belt: The
Power of Focus, Nonzero, My Secret Garden, Cracking the Millionaire Code, The
Elegant Universe, The Science of Mind, Stretching Scientifically, Monsters and
Magical Sticks (or There’s No Such Thing as Hypnosis), Word Freak, The Way and
Its Power, The Essential Tao, Secrets of the Online Marketing Superstars,
Diamond, The Monkey in the Mirror, Mind Hacks, Telling Lies, Freedom from the
Known, To the Actor: On the Technique of Acting, The Enlightened Sex Manual, Bringing Down the House,
Infinite Life, Guns Germs and Steel, Maximum Achievement, Kundalini Tantra,
Getting Everything You Can Out of All You’ve Got, The Age of Spiritual
Machines, My Life (Bill Clinton), Poker for Advanced Players, Conversations
with God Book I, Living the Science of Mind, Autobiography of a Yogi, The Four
Noble Truths, How to Be More Interesting, Getting to Yes, The Innovator’s
Dilemma, Good to Great, Top-Grading, The Corrections, The World’s Most
Dangerous Places, Collected Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke, The Hitchhiker’s Guide
to the Galaxy (trilogy), A Man in Full, Secrets of Voice-Over Success, Never (Jorie
Graham), Until I Find You, A Short
History of Myth, The Franklin Affair, Promises Betrayed, The Mysterious Flame
of Queen Loana (Eco), and Status
Anxiety by Alain de Botton, which I bought on Friday from Barnes and Noble
and intend to read tonight, because it just looked so tasty on the shelf that
day.  I promise it won’t happen again, o
my patient and beloved 52+ books-in-waiting (one for each week of the coming
year), until it happens again, at least. 
That would be when The Meaning of Tingo, and Other Remarkable Words from Around the World
arrives from Amazon.co.uk (it doesn’t come out here till March). 
For now, I must be off.  I have some expensive memories to
consolidate.

In the few years since I’ve graduated from medical
school, there has been enough time to go back to medical practice in
some form, but I haven’t and don’t intend to, so quit yer askin’,
dammit.  But of course, people keep on asking.  Their
comments range from the curious — “Why don’t you practice?” — to the
idealistic — “But medicine is such a wonderful profession!” — to the
almost hostile — “Don’t you like helping people?”  Since
it’s fairly certain that I will continue to be posed this question for
the rest of my natural existence, I figured that instead of launching
into my 15-minute polemic on the State of Medicine each time, which
could definitely end up cutting into my time sitting in
traffic, I could just write it up and give them the URL.  And
so now, unfettered by my prior obligations as an unbiased pre-med
advisor, here are the myriad reasons why you should not enter the
medical profession and the one reason you should enter it.  I have
assiduously gone through these arguments and expunged any hint of
evenhandedness, saving you time hunting for them.  And here
they are:

You will lose all the friends you had before medicine.
No foolin’.  You’ll be so caught up with taking classes, studying
for exams, doing ward rotations, taking care of too many patients as a
resident, trying to squeeze in a meal or an extra hour of sleep, that
your entire life pre-medicine will be relegated to some nether,
dust-gathering corner of your mind.  Docs and med students don’t
make it to their college reunions because who can take a whole weekend
off?  Unthinkable.  And so those old friends will simply
drift away because of said temporal and physical restrictions and be
replaced by your medical compadres, whom you have no choice but to see
every day.  Which brings us to…

You will have difficulty sustaining a relationship and will
probably break up with or divorce your current significant other during
training. For the same reasons enumerated above, you
just won’t have time for quality time, kid.  Any time you have
will be spent catching up on that microbiology lecture, cramming for
the Boards, getting some sleep after overnight call and just doing the
basic housekeeping of keeping a Homo sapiens medicus upright
and functioning.  When it’s a choice between having a meal/getting
some actual sleep after being up for 36 hrs vs. spending quality time
with your sig-o, which one wins, buddy?  I know he/she’s great and
all, but a relationship is a luxury that your pared-down, elemental,
bottom-of-the-Maslow-pyramid existence won’t be able to
afford.  Unless you’ve found some total saint who’s willing to
care for your burned-out carapace every day for 6-8 years without
complaint or expectation of immediate reward (and yes, these people do
exist, and yes, they will feel massively entitled after the 8 years
because of the enormous sacrifice they’ve put in, etc etc).

You will spend the best years of your life as a sleep-deprived, underpaid slave.
I will state here without proof that the years between 22 and 35,
being a time of good health, taut skin, generally idealistic
worldview, firm buttocks, trim physique, ability to legally
acquire intoxicating substances, having the income to acquire such
substances, high liver capacity for processing said substances, and
optimal sexual function, are the Best Years of Your
Life.  And if you enter the medical profession during this golden
interval, you will run around like a headless chicken trying to appease
various superiors (in the guise of professor, intern, resident, chief
resident, attending and department head, depending on your phase of
devolution) all the while skipping sleep every fourth day or so
and getting paid about minimum wage ($35k-$45k/yr for 80-100 hrs/wk of
work) or paying through the nose (med school costing about $40k/yr) the
whole while.  Granted, any job these days involves hierarchy and
superiors, but none of them keep you in such penury for so long.
Speaking of penury…

You will get yourself a job of dubious remuneration and high liability exposure.
For the amount of training you put in and the amount of blood, sweat
and tears medicine extracts from you (and I’m not being metaphorical
here), you should be getting paid an absurd amount of money as soon as
you finish residency.  I mean, you’re in your mid-thirties.
You put in 4 years of med school, and at least 4 years of residency (up
to 8 if you’re a surgeon).  You even did a fellowship and got paid
a pittance while doing that.  And for all the good you’re doing
humanity — you are healing people, for godssake —  you
should get paid more than some investment banker soullessly shifting
around spreadsheet numbers, some lawyer defending a tobacco company or
some consultant maximizing a client’s shareholder value.
Right?  Wrong. For the same time spent out of college, your I-banking, lawyering and consulting buddies are making 2-5 times
as much as you are.  At my tenth college
reunion, friends who had gone into finance were near
retirement and talking about their 10-acre parcel in Aspen, while
80% of my doctor classmates were still in residency, with an
average debt of $100,000 and a salary of $40,000.

But wait, we’re not done yet.  Who amongst these professionals
has to insure himself against the potential wrath of his own
clients?  The doctors, of course.  Average annual
liability premiums these days are around $30,000.  That goes
up to $80,000 for an obstetrician-gynecologist (who remains liable for
any baby s/he delivers until said infant turns 18) and into
the six-digit realm for neurosurgeons.   Atul Gawande
wrote a dynamite article about docs’ compensation in a recent (May 4,
2005) issue of The New Yorker entitled Piecework (http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/050404fa_fact) — check it out.

You will endanger your health and overall well-being.
The medical profession is bad for you.  Just ask any current
doctor or med student.  You will eat irregularly, eat poorly when
you do get the irregular meal (unless it’s a drug-company
sponsored meal — god bless their generous hearts and bottomless
pockets), have way too much cortisol circulating in your system from
all the stress you experience, have a compromised immune system because
of all the cortisol in your blood, get sick more often because of the
compromised immune system (and the perpetual exposure to disease
– it’s a hospital, surprise), and be perennially
sleep-deprived.  If your residency is four years long, on average
you will spend one of those years without any sleep.  A whole year of no sleep. Do you get that?  This is as bad for you as it is for patients (you’ve heard of Libby’s Law, right?  Check out http://www.newyorkmetro.com/nymetro/health/features/n_9426/).
My good friend and college classmate James — a serious contender for
the title of Nicest Guy on Earth – had a severe
car accident one morning on the way to the hospital because he fell
asleep behind the wheel.  Luckily, his airbag deployed and he
didn’t suffer long-term injuries.  Everyone seems to know already
that medical care can kill patients (haven’t read The House of God
by Samuel Shem yet?  Go get it now – brilliant and
easily the funniest book I’ve ever read), but it’s usually news that it
can kill the docs, too.

You will not have time to care for patients and treat them as well as you want to.
This is how the math works: Many patients.  Few of you –
usually one, unless you have florid multiple-personality
disorder.  So you have to take care of many patients.  And if
they’re in the hospital, that means they’re really sick, otherwise
they’d still be at home.  So you are scurrying around trying
to take care of all of them at once, which means that each individual
patient can only get a little bit of your time.  Which means that
you won’t have a chance to sit at the bedside of that sweet old vet and
hear his stories of Iwo Jima.  Or get to the bottom of why that
LOL (little old lady — medical slang’s been around way longer
than internet slang, buddy) can’t get her daughter to come
visit.  Or to do any of that idealistic stuff that you cooked up
in your adolescent brain about really connecting with
patients.  Get a grip!  This is about action, about taking
care of business, about getting shit done, about making that note look
sharp because the attending is coming to round in an hour and he’s a
hardass, and that’s the difference your passing and getting recommended
for honors, so get on it already and quit yakking with the gomer (which
is an older patient with so many problems you should have never
let him/her get admitted in the first place — stands for ’get out
of my ER’, and I didn’t make it up the acronym, so direct
your indignant wrath elsewhere, thank you very much).
It’s about CYA — cover your ass.  For better or for
worse, you just start to treat patients as problems and illness-bearing
entities for the sake of mental efficiency (”55yo WM s/p rad
prostatectomy c hx CHF & COPD”), which does not do much for your
empathetic abilities.  Which brings us to…

You will start to dislike patients — and by extension, people in general.
OK, so now you’re overworked, underpaid, underfed, and
sleep-deprived.  Whose fault is that?  Well, it’s not really
the hospital’s fault — it’s just drawn that way.  And it’s
not your boss’s fault, because somebody has to take care of patients,
and he can’t do it because he’s the boss, duh.  So whom to
blame?  Ah yes — patients.  It’s the patients’
fault.  They’re the ones creating all the work!  The ones who
get in the way of your nap, your catching your favorite TV
show, having an uninterrupted meal, getting together with your
sig-o for some therapeutic nookie.  How dare he have an MI while
you’re watching CSI?  Does she have any consideration,
letting her blood pressure tank to 40 over palp at 3.30am, while you’re
making out with Elle MacPherson on the shores of Bora Bora (assuming
you’re lucky enough to be actually asleep)?  The logic may be
twisted — patients, on the whole, don’t get sick voluntarily or
out of spite to you – but it is deeply ingrained
in medical culture.  Heck, there’s even a slang term for it:
a hit.  As in, “We got four hits on our admitting shift
at the ER today.”  Hit — the same way you would be struck by a
mortar, or a shell, or a bomb.  Getting hit is a Bad Thing.
These aren’t people — these are potentially lethal disasters that
can explode all over the place and ruin your whole day.  “We got
hit again” — one more patient to take care of, says the
resident.  But really, is that resident blameless?  Or how
about Dr Hardass and his intransigent ways?  Hell, they’re at
fault, too!  Soon the circle of blame expands to the outer reaches
of the cosmos, and every potentially accountable organism from amoeba
to blue whale will be personally responsible for your misery.  But
lest you think we’ve forgotten you, patients, take heart –
it’s all still your fault.

You will start to be disliked by people who do not even know you.
Once upon a day, in a time somewhere between the Cretaceous and
Triassic eras, physicians were held in awe and respect by the general
public.  Their seeming omniscience was revered, and TV shows like Marcus Welby MD glorified their empathetic sangfroid and cool grace.  Heck, they
were even considered sexy or something.  I only noticed in recent
years that this ain’t the case no more, and doctors rank on the
contempt scale somewhere above meter maids and at or just below divorce
lawyers (but still much higher than I-bankers and other
invertebrates).  The average Joe and Janet are tired of the
ever-rising cost of medical care, tired of all the stories of
malpractice, tired of the perceived greed of the pharmaceutical firms,
tired of the heartless profit-focussed practices of insurance
companies.  But where do they pin their frustration?  To
whom can they direct their ire?  Insurance and drug companies are
nameless, faceless entities, as are hospitals.  We need a person
to blame, like a nurse or a doc.  Nurses are overworked and
massively underpaid, so it doesn’t really make sense to get mad at
them.  But doctors — those Mercedes-driving, Armani-wearing,
private-school using, golf-playing
arriviste docs!  By being the most visible symbol
of the medical profession, the doctor will have the dubious
distinction of being the scapegoat for all its
maladies.  Fair?  Hell no — we already told you
docs are overworked, underpaid, and often railing at the same
injustices Joe and Janet are.  Most of them don’t even play
golf!  But such it is.  Just letting you know which
direction the rotten tomatoes are flying so you can consciously
choose to stand at the ‘toss’ or ’splat’ end of
the trajectory.

And the one reason why you should go into medicine:
You have only ever envisioned yourself as a doctor and can only derive professional fulfillment in life by taking care of sick people.
There’s really no other reason, and lord knows the world needs
docs.  Prestige, money, job security, making mom happy, proving
something, can’t think of anything else to do, better than being a
lawyer, etc are all incredibly bad reasons for becoming a doc.
You should become a doc because you always wanted to work for Medecins Sans Frontieres
and your life will be half-lived without that.  You should become
a doc because you want to be the psychiatrist who makes a
breakthrough in schizophrenia treatment.  You should become a
doc because you love making sick kids feel better and being the
one to reassure the parents that it’ll all be OK, and nothing
else in the world measures up to that.  Or as my general
surgery resident put it, you should become a doc because “my dad was an
ass surgeon, my big brother’s an ass surgeon, and by god I’m going to
become an ass surgeon.”  But woe betide you if there’s
anything else, anything at all, that would also give you that
fulfillment.  Because your pursuit of medicine would preclude
chasing down that other dream and a whole lot more – a dream
that could be much bigger, much more spectacular, much more
enriching for yourself and humanity than being a
physician.  Just ask John Keats, Walker Percy, Sir Arthur Conan
Doyle, Giorgio Armani, or Michael Crichton (some of these
guys being more alive than others these days).  Or you can
just ask me a few years down the road, by which time I should have
a blog entry for that question, too.

Here’s a little something I wrote about Cambridge when I first got there. May you find it enlightening and amusing.

“A late welcome from the banks (and BoGs) of the Cam”

It is a Sunday morning here in Cambridge, with an absurdly forceful wind
whipping through town, ripping off tree branches, launching horizontal
raindrops at pedestrians at relativistic speeds and making cyclists ride at
oblique angles just to maintain balance. It’s been nearly three weeks
since I arrived here, having left on a Sunday afternoon to arrive at the
Monday morning opening ceremonies of my course with 150lb of luggage in
tow. Just days before, I had been told by the course assistant director
that ‘There’s no reason for you to show up before October 5′, only to be
informed the next day that orientation begins October 7. As it turns out
there were many reasons to be present before the 5th — somewhat symbolic
of the slapdash nature of this course, as it is the first time it’s being
done. More on that later.

It is just after brunch at the Caius College (pronounced ‘keys’) dining hall,
which comprised two fried eggs, a croissant, a bowl of yoghurt, a glass of
Minute Maid orange juice, canned pear tomatoes and beans, and a raft of
bacon and sausage and hash browns which I dodged — all notable because
they form the essence of the Full English Breakfast experience. I’m
sitting here in the computer room, in the basement of the Caius College
Library, right next to the Senate House. The latter is a rectangular
building in the grand neoclassical style, where the Praelectors of the
various colleges lead their graduating gowned flocks to receive their degrees,
each college marching in the order of their founding (Caius is fourth,
after Peterhouse, Clare College and Pembroke College). But, pray tell, where is the
Senate House — or, more specifically, what street is it on? The answer
can initiate you into the some of the folly and madness that is Cambridge
(and, ultimately, England).
You see, the Senate House is technically on King’s Parade (not King’s
Parade Street — just King’s Parade), on what I think of as the main
Cambridge U drag. Except that the northern edge of it starts being called
Trinity St. But the southern edge tends toward Trumpington St. What you
start to notice is that over the course of 500 yards, this street changes
names 4 times: St John’s St, Trinity St, King’s Parade, Trumpington St,
Trumpington Rd (see
 http://www.cam.ac.uk/map/v3/drawmap.cgi?…), and it’s
not the only street that does this. So, even armed with an address such as
‘6 Trumpington St’, you can have a hell of a time finding a place, because
you are never really sure which street you’re standing on unless you
already know the town well. Add to that the capricious nature of numbering
houses (sometimes alternating even and odd on opposite street sides,
sometimes not) and the sporadic presence of street signs, and every new
address becomes a new adventure.
But these names are old, old, and going against 750 years of history
around these parts remains a losing proposition. And, until the 19th
century, the Colleges had hegemony over the town, to the extent of setting
prices for such things as bread and ale. So the little stretch of street
in front of Trinity College will be called Trinity Street, and 50 meters
up, in front of St John’s College it’s St John’s St, hallelujah and amen.
And to put in perspective how old Cambridge is, just think of this: when
Sir Isaac Newton, the Lucasian Professor of Mathematicks, was writing his
Principia Mathematica, Cambridge was already older than Harvard is now.
Got it? Good.

“Keep that bike off the pavement, mate”

In the battle against archaic addressing, your best weapon (save
memorizing — oops, I mean memorising — the damn map) is speed. And that
is achieved through the humble bicycle. Even beyond the spire- and
cornice-lined streets, it’s the preponderance of bicycles that struck me
most upon first arriving here. Every bicycle rack, street sign, and
building wall is festooned with metal and rubber, spoke and mudguard, three
or four deep. There being at least three times as many cycles here as
there are things to fasten them to, most of the two-wheeled conveyances are
freestanding, leaning against a wall (which, by the way, would NEVER happen
in Boston — the bikes would simply vanish). Almost all streets are marked with cycle paths, even one-way
ones having a little bike lane going the opposite way. And, at the top of
every hour, as lectures let out, a stream of pedalers floods every street
even more than before. Students, professors, fellows, rich people, poor
people — everyone cycles. Those who have children of their own wear
helmets; the rest (85+%) meander blissfully bareheaded. In sheer volume,
Amsterdam ain’t got nothin’ on this town when it comes to bikes (NB: I
have since been to Amsterdam, and I sit corrected. Still — whole lotta
bikes.)
And so, wishing to be part of the wheeled and mobile masses, on my second
day here, I set out on a bike hunt. You will be shocked to find that I
bought the first bike that I found at the first bike shop that I visited
(those who know me well realize the improbability of such an event). There
it was: a Trek 700 hybrid, fully tricked out in the Cambridge Urban
Geriatric package — mud guards front and back, front and back lights
(required), rear rack (for passengers), chain guard (to save your trouser
cuffs — key!) and the all-important front basket. An older gentleman had
customized his bike for commuting, found that his knees couldn’t take the
strain, and returned it less than a week after its purchase. I immediately
recognized how much time and money I’d have to spend to get a bare-bones
bike to have all these accoutrements, and how I could never get them for a
mere

About a month ago, I had the opportunity to visit parts of the US that I had not seen before. Having lived mostly in Boston and Southern California, I had left the vast middle portion of the country unexplored. So I welcomed the mission to get some work done in San Antonio, Dallas, Ft Worth, St Louis and Cleveland. The cities were lovely: San Antonio’s Riverfront eating/shopping district was quite charming even late on a sleepy Monday night; Dallas had an upstart, upwardly mobile feel to it with a very lively youth culture (and exceptionally welcoming people); and St Louis seemed to have much more to commend it than just a big ol’ arch. I was particularly gratified that in my 24-hr sojourn in St Louis, I very nearly got caught in a hailstorm of 2-inch ice pellets and a tornado. To this here left- and right-coaster, that was as quintessentially Midwestern an experience as having an earthquake and brushfire would be to Joe Sixpack visiting LA for a day from Kansas City.
Although my time to roam amongst the natives was limited, I thought that a scan of the area radio stations from the comfort of my rental car would be a step towards capturing the local zeitgeist. And so, armed with the craftily-named ‘Scan’ button of the radio, I listened. The very first station that tuned in caught a female voice singing the chorus of a song: ‘God is with us.’ The second station was talk, not music, and sounded like a speech or a sermon — something about Michael looking across the water to see Jesus walking on it. The next one was a Christian rock station. Of the seven or so stations that I scanned before settling on some classical music, four were broadcasting either Christian music or preaching. Now an evangelical radio station per se is not anomalous, but what struck me was the preponderance of such formats in these markets. Clearly all these stations have an audience to make them economically sustainable. Although my survey was informal, you would never get such a high percentage of Christian stations in Los Angeles, New York City, Boston or San Francisco. I’d even argue that there isn’t a total of 4 such stations on the FM dial in any one of those markets.
OK, so what? In my last blog entry, I talked about my surprise at finding out about the vastness of the evangelical book market. And these travels along the highways of Middle America, where billboards urge passersby to accept Christ as their savior at a weekend-long revivalist retreat, confirmed my suspicion of the existence of an America with which I am less familiar: what the journalists have been calling ‘Red America’, after the infamous map of the 2000 Presidential election showing the states voting for Gore in blue (mostly seaboard states) and those voting for Bush in red (the inland states). The designation ‘Red America’ is particularly ironic, since the color red has historically carried strong anti-American connotations: first symbolizing the perceived Native American threat (the ‘red man’) to homesteaders in the nation’s earlier years; and then standing in for Communism (the ‘Red Menace’) from the early twentieth century till 1989 (and today to some extent).
This evening I had the privilege of seeing Robert Reich, the Secretary of Labor under Bill Clinton, give a speech at the United Methodist Church in Venice, CA. He was his usual self-deprecatingly funny self, opening with: “All these years in public service have worn me down. I started out being 6′2″, and now look where I am.” Although me may stand a mere 5 feet tall, his persona and charisma more than filled the room. He talked about many subjects, including his forays into Red America along his cross-country drive from Cambridge, MA to Berkeley, CA with his eldest son. At the roadside diners, he would sometimes be approached by locals (”because I looked peculiar”), who would engage him in discussion with a “You’re a Democrat, aren’t you?,” to which he would respond, “Yes, and I’m proud to be one.” After the native would proclaim himself/herself a Republican, Reich would ask why he/she would vote for Bush. According to Reich, the near-unanimous response in all of these states was “because he’s honest” (which elicited audible groans from the Venice audience). After Reich presents his interlocutor with a few incontrovertible counterexamples to this trope, the native changes his tune and says, “Well, it’s really because he’s so folksy.” Aaaah. So that’s it — somehow W’s good ol’ boy talk and broken English conveys to these Reds that he’s one of them, in spite of his blue-blood pedigree and life of perpetual privilege. The surprising and even encouraging part of Reich’s report was that, after only 3 or 4 minutes of presenting some simple facts about the current administration’s record, many of those he spoke to were quite willing to admit, “Well, y’know, maybe I won’t be voting for him after all.”
All of this brings me to this question: Is America really as divided as the red-blue map would make us think it is? Reich would have us reconsider that, and there’s evidence to support that. You can see the red-blue map from the 2000 election at this site  http://www.makethemaccountable.com/misc/…). If you scroll down further, you will see another quite ingenious (and utterly logical) map that colors each state in a blend of blue and red in its proportion of Democratic and Republican votes cast in the 2000 elections. What this map shows is that almost all of America, with the exception of a handful of stronghold states (CA, IL, NY, MA, RI, HI for the blues; ID, NB, WY, UT for the reds) is more or less the same shade of purple. So perhaps there are more of the 40% self-identified evangelical Christians in those red states, who may identify with the Bush born-again persona and some its attendant dogmatism, and maybe they did vote for him in the 2000 elections in greater proportion. But in the end, we all want to be able to stand tall as Americans and be proud of the values of freedom, tolerance and high-mindedness that has made this country great, prosperous and a model of hope. And all Americans are smart enough to know that no amount of folksiness can ever make up for a compromise of those values, or being worse off then they were four years ago, or the threat of being drafted to an unjustified war, or having their sons and daughters come back from halfway across the globe in a body bag. Reich’s note of pragmatic optimism, echoing that of Clinton in his BEA speech three weeks ago, resonates with me. The American people have consistently chosen and will choose unity, democracy still works, and we’re gonna be alright. Now get out there and get the word out.