On “Dowitcher”

I’d have guessed that “dowitcher”, like “finch” goes back to Old English, or at least Middle English, like “snipe”. It’s a fun word to say that seems appropriate for a shorebird that is slightly frumpy and can be extremely difficult to identify to species. According to the W2, the Webster’s unabridged dictionary of 1934, it is not an old English word at all but a borrowing from the Iroquoian language family.

A dowitcher, by mikebaird via Wikimedia, CC Attribution

I was interested that it took so long for the OED to catch onto this bird: the first edition takes no notice of “dowitcher” at all. The first supplement, of 1933, speculates, for reasons unclear, that the word comes from “Deutscher”, meaning something German. Finally the second supplement, which came out in the nineteen seventies and eighties, adopted the etymology of the W2. I’d like to know more about the Iroquoian word and how that connection was discovered, but I don’t think I have adequate sources to hand.

Witmer Stone (in Bird Studies at Old Cape May, published in 1937) writes that hunters on the Jersey Shore called it the Sea Pigeon. That’s another right sounding name, particularly so when people were still in the habit of eating them. He also refers to the two varieties, now held to be full species, as Eastern Dowitcher and Long-billed Dowitcher, and in his taxonomy called the Long-billed a subspecies scolopaceus of the nominate species Limnodromus griseus. Somewhere along the line, a committee decided that Short-billed Dowitcher paired better with Long-billed Dowitcher.

The Green Heron, Basar via Wikimedia, CC Attribution Share Alike

I have decided to meet the great renaming of North American birds with an open mind. The uncertainties and flexibility to be found in the most important ornithological and etymological sources fortifies me in this attitude. Stone is a wonderful source of old names, as well as birding anecdote. Perhaps sometime I’ll discuss his account of the Green Heron and the “offensive local names” alluded to as burdening that “interesting personality”.

The Massachusetts State Bookstore

It took me far too long to visit the Massachusetts State House. This morning, after a security screening, I was allowed to wander pretty freely through the ornate halls of my state government. It’s a beautiful building, and somewhat confusing. For one thing, Mount Vernon Street passes between the older portion and the newer office wings, necessitating a trip upstairs to reach portions of the ground floor. For another, the main doors are opened only for great occasions of state, meaning that flow through the building is not oriented as far forward as one might expect. I made a couple of passes around the main rotunda, bemuraled and decked with historic flags, and peeked furtively at the frosted glass doors proclaiming “State Treasurer’s Office” or “Party Leader” in noir detective style lettering. I hope to return for a tour and a view of the chambers of the General Court (as our legislature is called here).

The Rotunda, by Lea-Kim Chateauneuf via Wikipedia, CC attribution and share alike

I had a specific mission today, and that was to find the Massachusetts State Bookstore. This place still really exists! Until I saw it with my own eyes I harbored a fear that it had gone the way of the card catalogue or the dial-a-bird hotline. In fact I found a neat little shop and a friendly clerk. The place had somewhat the air of a university bookstore, with bound packets shelved flat, but the prices were lower by a factor of ten or twenty. Here you can buy packets of statutes pertaining to such bodies as the Board of Registration of Chiropractors, or the Register of Historic Sites. The clerk told me that the best seller is the building code, mostly ordered online. The historic register was a serious temptation to me, but I held off; I’d have to think about how to bind it. They sell various sections of the Massachusetts General Laws, and as far as I know that comes closest to the question I have heard a few times and never known how to answer, “Where can I find The Law?”

I wasn’t opposed to spending money on this visit, but in the event I came away gratis with a neatly produced copy of the Constitution of Massachusetts. Does your state have a bookstore? If not, I recommend asking your state representative why not.

Lost Law Books

I’m always impressed by the passage in 2 Kings 22, “I have found the book of the law in the house of the Lord… when the king heard the words of the book of the law, he rent his clothes.” I get the sense, leaving aside scholarly debate on the origins of the books of the Bible, that the kings of Jerusalem who preceded Josiah were so wicked that they actually managed to misplace the Bible. When he heard what it had to say, Josiah was so shocked that he reformed his life, and learned a lesson about the impermanence of human institutions.

In the beginning of the Commentaries on the Laws of England there are two more instances of law books being lost and found (V.I, pp. 17, 64):

“A copy of Justinian’s Pandects, being newly discovered at Amalfi (circa AD 1130), soon brought the civil law into vogue all over the west of Europe…”

And “Alfred… found it expedient to compile his dome book or liber judicialis, for the general use of the whole kingdom. This book is said to have been extant so late as the reign of king Edward the fourth [i.e., in the Wars of the Roses], but is now unfortunately lost.” Blackstone may have missed it but apparently Alfred is still extant.

Blackstone takes pains to explain the different types and origins of the law in England. “As Bacon saith, our laws are as mixed as our language, and as our language is so much the richer, the laws are the more complete.” (p.64)

I suspect that law books of all sorts are still vanishing; the school casebooks and various kinds of office furniture that are reissued every couple of years don’t have near the pretension to general interest and staying power that Blackstone’s commentaries do. (They were published beginning in 1765.) I wonder where Blackstone’s own sources are. Lists of Fortescue’s and Selden’s works appear in the bibliography to the O.E.D. and Selden is on the list of active text publication societies on Wikipedia. I haven’t tried to find them in the library.

I don’t know if I’ll keep going with Blackstone but if I do I’ll try to put some of the more interesting passages here.

The Allegations Have Proven Baseless

About ten years ago Nicholson Baker got curious about biological weapons in the Korean War (1950-1953).  The mainstream story is that although the U.S. appropriated the results of very cruel experiments in Germany and Japan, and continued extensive research in bioweapons during the early part of the Cold War, we never used these weapons offensively.  Baker is inclined to question this, and indeed there have always been dissenters, not least the among the North Koreans and Chinese.

As a great user and critic of libraries* Baker knew where to look and what he was looking for: letters and plans belonging to the Air Force, Army, CIA, State Department, and so forth, whose existence is well catalogued and which are held in places such as the National Archives.  “Because I carried around with me one unanswered question, all these repositories came alive.”  That’s a great feeling.  But when you are researching something like biological weapons, you tend to get a lot of empty folders.  Archivists don’t exactly stonewall you, most of the time; instead they retrieve a form explaining that what you are looking for has been withheld on security grounds.  You might also get a copy of the document you want, covered in black blocks and bars of redaction.  You can appeal for a clean copy, and the relevant agency is supposed to respond quickly.  Instead of writing a history of the Korean War, Baker has written about this struggle with government secrecy and with the weapon that is supposed to check that secrecy, the Freedom of Information Act.

The upshot of his research is that Baker thinks bioweapons were used, but in a haphazard way that was as much designed to create fear and confusion as to produce enemy casualties or gain ground for U.S. troops and their allies.  At one point, it appears that operatives were simply disposing of laboratory animals by dumping them over communist territory.  If one is not convinced that the use of biological weapons is abominable as such (and beside the indiscriminate nature of pathogens designed to infect humans, plans were made expressly to target crops and livestock), perhaps casualties inflicted on our own researchers, and the impetus given to the Soviets and others to pursue their own research should give one pause.  The CIA was as responsible for this as the armed forces.

The idea that the plans and capability existed is not as controversial as the idea that bioweapons were actually used.  That’s a frustrating thing about the science of defense.  We had to research these things in order to protect ourselves, the argument goes.  Baker mentions some very surprising tests that were done on the dispersal of germs in cities like San Francisco and St. Louis, and in the New York City subway, all, naturally, without the knowledge of citizens.  He even thinks that one of our ongoing minor plagues, Lyme disease, escaped from a lab in the northeast.  To be sure, government scientists were breeding ticks and comparing the virulence of different strains of disease.  But this is where I am most inclined to say Baker goes too far.  He’s in kook territory.  I can hardly vouch for my reaction, though.  In large part, I simply would not want to believe that some evil bureaucrat was responsible for something like this and that I’ve been kept in the dark.

To this Baker would say that we should just release the records.  Some of the stories are so gross that I am sure he would like to be proven wrong.  Proof is attainable, and denied.  While he waited on his requests, and gave up and wrote other books, friends and fellow researchers got old and died.  The question seems insurmountable.  Pentagon spokespeople continue to deny that we used these weapons.  In one memorable quotation, they said the charge had “proven baseless”, but “baseless” was a code name for the weapons program itself.  If we knew the truth, or even if we felt that we had the right to know, whatever the truth is, perhaps we would treat the government differently today.  Baker thinks that the agencies in question are simply afraid that if we found out all their misdeeds at once, we would abolish them.

This is somewhat controversial stuff but I was disappointed to find reviewers in papers like The New York Times unwilling to go along for the ride.  It’s clear that some people have not forgiven Baker for Human Smoke.  In that book, he excoriated the motives of Roosevelt and Churchill and questioned the notion of “the good war”.  He’s a real pacifist.  So these reviewers take him to task for moral superiority and precious whimsy.  One reviewer asserts that Baker’s capacity to imagine a world without planners of mass destruction is somehow more dangerous than the planning of mass destruction itself.  Only The Guardian, among those I checked, had the honesty to mention the bioweapon tests on American cities.

It’s true that to finally write this book, Baker resorted to writing about what he did every day while pondering these questions.  He writes about what he ate in the cafeteria of the National Archives and about what his dogs were up to when he woke up early and read email and declassified CIA documents in bed on his phone.  If you don’t want to read about the quotidian, you should not read a Nicholson Baker book, but you will be missing out.

You may also find your moral superiority threatened.  I think Baker should be approved for questioning the psychology of figures like Kissinger and the early leaders of the CIA.  They too resorted to psychology, so called, and with considerably more malice.  This was the era of “psychological warfare”, of MKULTRA, and the lobotomy.  On that last, it isn’t nice, but I think it’s instructive to contemplate the fact that JFK’s own sister had such a half baked procedure carried out on her, and was mentally and physically crippled for life.  I keep thinking of Mrs. Dalloway, and an offhand observation there concerning a shell shocked WWI veteran, that we don’t know how the soul works.  It’s more or less still true, no matter who might want to tell you otherwise.

Baker impressed me by writing that although these sorts of projects seem hellish and unstoppable, sometimes they do simply stop.  If I understand correctly, Nixon called a halt to much of our biological weapons program towards the end of the Vietnam war.  This was partly owing to public revulsion to the effects of Agent Orange.  Winning the war might not be worth the means, which seems like an idea worthy of informed consideration.

* I’ve written about Baker on libraries here.  According to him, the Library of Congress itself was bent to the purposes of the planners of mass destruction with the establishment of a secretive maps department for planning bombardments.  We might have used the space in better ways, maybe for storing the newspaper collections that Baker has written on elsewhere, but “in trying to find out how best to bomb our enemies, we bombed ourselves.”

Pre-Ferrante Post

These days I’ve found renewed pleasure in buying new books. It’s probably because I don’t visit the library as much anymore, at least in person. The other day after work I got on my bike, a thing that before the pandemic I never considered doing in the city, and rode out of downtown along the Commonwealth Avenue Mall. Dusk was starting to gather under the big trees. Then I zipped through the Mass Avenue underpass, went by Fenway Park a few blocks to my left, and pushed up the grade along Beacon Street with my head a-swivel.

I only had to poke my head in the door at the annex to the Brookline Booksmith to pick up Elena Ferrante’s newest novel The Lying Life of Adults. I had ordered online and it was the very day of release. On the way back to my apartment I turned up my lights for the ride back on less trafficked, but darker streets. This is the second of three or perhaps four new releases I’ve been excited enough to order this season. Maybe by pre-blogging it now, I’ll feel obliged to post again when I’ve read it.

Why was I excited? I’ve read Ferrante’s Naples quartet twice, and her three other novels. Of those latter, The Lost Daughter is maybe the most entertaining, and clearly a run through of the famous series that followed. I’d call The Days of Abandonment best overall. Troubling Love was, as it says, troubling. It’s hard to pick and choose.

Here’s a passage I wrote down from Troubling Love. It describes how the narrator, Delia, found the water running in her mother’s apartment after she died. She explains that her mother was fanatically frugal:

“I felt uneasy: she had wasted more water with that distraction in the last hours of life than in all her existence. I saw her floating face down, suspended in the middle of the kitchen, against the background of blue majolica tiles.” (p. 27)

Her mother drowned, but not in the kitchen. This kind of unannounced hallucination is characteristic of the narration in this novel, I wrote at the time. Did Delia’s mother really leave the water running? It’s a mystery story, but if there was a resolution I missed it. The title in Italian is L’Amore Molesto.

My impression of The Days of Abandonment is that I found it significantly less harrowing, although I’m finding that hard to explain. There’s a poisoning and an accident with broken glass. I made a note of “the terror of the frenzy of doing”, and of the tendency for minor physical objects to play a big part in Ferrante’s plots. In the quartet, it’s shoes and dolls, and in this novel, the phone and the lock on the front door.

When I read The Lying Life of Adults, I’ll be on the look out for these sorts of things and especially for dolls. But I’m hoping to be surprised as well. I’m also wondering about a suggestion I saw somewhere that this is a young adult novel. Maybe I imagined it. In any case, Ferrante may be uniquely prepared to write such a thing.

Long Term Guests

I didn’t get around to making a big library trip before everything shut down. I can’t complain; I still have more books than I can read and I don’t mind reading electronically. My library has fantastic free electronic material. So I’m more amused than anything else by the three unexpectedly long term boarders I’ve taken on from the BPL. (Alas, the Museum of Fine Arts doesn’t seem to be lending out paintings to be appreciated during this time of closures and distancing.)

The only one I’ve actually read is Hitler’s First Victims, by Timothy Ryback. I said I was amused, but as luck would have it, none of these books is anything you would call light! This is a quick, gripping read though, and might help one begin to understand the sorts of struggles that were actually involved in the Nazi takeover. It’s a nonfiction account of the investigation of four murders that took place in what was becoming Dachau concentration camp in Bavaria. In 1933, the SS had taken over an old factory being used as a camp for political prisoners, but the Bavarian state still exercised its authority to investigate deaths that took place there. Germany, and Bavaria in particular, had essentially undergone civil war after the first world war, and was still far from united. A prosecutor named Josef Hartinger came very close to indicting and arresting the Nazi officer in charge of the camp for the very thinly disguised murders of four Jews. However, at the same time that Hartinger was risking his neck to investigate Dachau, the president of Bavaria, Heinrich Held, was being forced from office, almost literally, by stormtroopers. Hartinger’s evidence would later reappear at Nuremberg.

I ran across Hitler’s First Victims in the law section (K in Library of Congress classification). It’s an interesting and sometimes neglected portion of the public library, I think. You find a weird mix of things that resemble big test prep books for people who might be divorcing or selling a house, and forlorn looking attempts to write popular accounts of particular points of constitutional theory and legal history. It deserves digging into. I believe that on the night of my last visit I was looking for, of all things, justice Antonin Scalia’s book Making Your Case, which is a little manual of writing and rhetoric I’d seen somewhere and gotten intrigued by.

Instead, the next book I ended up with was one I’d taken out before and still haven’t read: Must We Defend Nazis? by Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic. A while ago I got in a heated debate with a friend over the first amendment. Presumably this book is taking up a similar position to my friend, arguing against what Oliver Wendell Holmes famously described as “freedom for the thought that we hate”, at least in extreme cases like hate speech. I guess I think that attempting to completely clamp down on that kind of thing, to the point of, I imagine, breaking presses and confiscating books, is a terrifying prospect, both highly apt to abuse and fundamentally the wrong way to fight against wrong ideas. I still haven’t read this book, but if I’ve learned anything since this argument, it’s that first amendment law is broad and remedies for insidious thoughts more nuanced than one is likely to appreciate in a spur of the moment argument. Now that I think about it, the first book might make you wonder how it is that law matters at all.

The third book I’m keeping is Organized Money: How Progressives can Leverage the Financial System to Work for Them, not Against Them, by Keith Mestrich and Mark Pinsky. I don’t have much to say about it, but perhaps my long struggle to get through Piketty attests to a standing concern with big financial questions. All I can think of to say about this book is that my friends who look confused and skeptical when I talk about leaving Bank of America and joining a credit union are clearly missing out on some of the puzzle pieces. I found it in the new arrivals section. Its classification is HG, finance; H, social sciences, is another interesting section, where I find myself prone to skulking, particularly HV (social pathology, so called) and HX (communism).

I could probably write a post on what I like about every letter of the LOC system. Should that be next? Or maybe a post on the books I have actually managed to read lately?

Early Riser

I got off my Green Line trolley at Park Street Station the other morning and turned toward the broad flight of stairs that leads up to the corner of Boston Common.  I’ve probably done it a thousand times but I was struck by a pang of fear.  I was sure that outside of the familiar, skylit granite box of the station entrance was a deadly whiteout blizzard.  A winter to bring the glaciers back.  And I wasn’t facing it with a clear head, either, but with the narced out fogginess of someone who ought to be sleeping through this season.  I might even meet the Gronk, and I don’t mean the Patriots’ goofy tight end.  No, the Gronk is invisible on film, huge on radar, takes the fingers of her victims and leaves their clothes neatly folded.  Fortunately, it was just a passing impression.  In reality, Boston winters aren’t much.  I had been reading Jasper Fforde’s Early Riser.

I felt like a wealthy man when the Boston Public Library called me to tell me my reserve was in.  I took an extra long lunch break and went to the central branch to pick up my brand new copy, four days after release.  I had been waiting a long time for a new Fforde novel.  Unfortunately, I’m just not ready to let him off the hook for Shades of Grey.  The present book, a standalone I believe, is genuine Fforde and pretty strange, but it suffers in the shadow of that unfortunately titled unfinished series.  Still, the list of things the book does well is impressive.

Perhaps because I’d expected something quite different, I thought a lot about how closely Fforde hews to the formula of the noir.  Fforde’s characters, as far as I know, are always loners and always out of their depths investigating some mystery.  Family plays a role in the Thursday Next books and in Shades of Gray, but the really important characters are always antagonists or comrades in arms.  Though I’ve hardly read any real noir, I feel like I know their stock characters somewhat through Fforde.  In Early Riser, there’s Birgitta, apparently a classic seductress.  She’s trouble anyway, and she has a ravishing routine when she asks to paint our young hero’s portrait.  There’s Laura, a cheerful girl just trying to get along in a harsh world.  Her firstborn has already been optioned.  She has self effacing lines that reminded me of Stiggins, the neanderthal cop in Thursday Next.  Finally there are the actual comrades in arms, including a couple of haunted veterans of a vaguely described southern war who have taken to wearing suicide vests at all times.  They’re determined to take as many Wintervolk, Villains, and Nightwalkers as possible out with them when they go.

So I haven’t said what’s going on yet.  It’s not really a spoiler, though there might be a few mild ones here.  Charlie Worthing is a novice Winter Consul.  His calling is to see the bulk of humanity through hibernation.  In this Wales, people hibernate not only to escape the cold but to save food.  Someone has to keep any eye on things.  Fforde doesn’t do a lot of broad, explicit world building, but there are clues as to what’s going on.  Anglesey, in the northwest corner of Wales, is under the ice cap (the cause of an important philatelic rarity).  There’s suggestion that England suffered a catastrophe that scattered the traditional nobility.  One question is whether this is a global cooling novel, so to speak, and I’ll return to that.

Every year, some portion of the sleepers fail to return to full consciousness, and instead wake up as mindless zombies called Nightwalkers.  It’s quite an achievement for Fforde to have made zombies fun again.  This version is only dangerous when very hungry, so a good Winter Consul makes sure to have a stash of Mars Bars and other British sounding goodies on hand to facilitate the humane treatment of Nightwalkers.  Despite the risks, the annual hibernation is embraced by all to the point of being a physiological habit.  Only someone like Charlie, an indentured orphan, would take on the dangers of staying up in winter and “early rising”.  

It’s a problem that when Charlie begins investigating a dream that’s upsetting sleepers and causing violent behavior, the reader recognizes it as the crucial mystery, whereas the consuls must continue to fumble.  It doesn’t help that the plot drew comparisons to the movie Inception, which I feel caused a big splash and went absolutely nowhere, like most dreams.  Perhaps Early Riser will do better, partly because it’s a novel.  In places, I was fairly impressed that through all the bizarre madcap, Fforde was coming round to the bluntly topical.  But maybe I’m unrealistic in expecting that dream reading and dream inducing technologies will shortly exist.  Literature certainly already creates a kind of shared dreaming, more so than movies, as was mooted around the time of Inception.

Other aspects of Fforde’s satires strike me now as more realistic than they might appear.  I think in most of his novels the maleficent corporation is only ever chastened by the investigator’s work, not brought down. I also noticed that the strange and irresistible walnut handled Bambis, the Thumper, and the array of other amusing weapons and effects quite casually show security forces willing to repurpose and push the use of less lethal weapons to the point where someone mentions that bringing back bullets might actually be desirable.  Sure, a little knock from a wave of compressed air sounds ok, but what about when a blast from a two handed Cowpuncher gets refracted through a narrow doorway and pops your target like a balloon?  It gives different meaning to the term “Bernoullize”*.

I hope I’ve already conveyed that some of the blizzard scenes in this are pretty good and a bit frightening.  There’s a fairly dark infanticide subplot.  There are creepy scenes in the dormitoria, which are huge silo structures, heated by atomic reactors to just above freezing.  After lights out, there’s only the flickering of ritual candles.  Of course, there’s more activity in them than meets the eye.  These buildings are named like ships, it seemed to me, like the Sarah Siddons, and resemble them also with their skeleton crews and cargoes of innocent passengers trying to travel from autumn to spring. 

Is this a global warming novel in some sense?  I wonder if it’s been raised in reviews or interviews but I haven’t looked yet.  Fforde makes some transparent allusions, in questionable taste.  I take global warming seriously.  He uses the words “inconvenient truth”.  He also talks about trading carbon, but in the opposite sense, with Wales getting positive credit for out of control coal mine fires.  But I think I’ve reconciled myself to this.  For one thing, I’m open to a fairly wide characterization of what global warming literature might be.  I’m fairly sure that Seveneves should count, even if Neal Stephenson is trying to set himself up as a skeptic or a techno optimist or what have you.  In Seveneves, people are fighting a natural disaster against an impossible deadlines, and the experience as a reader is not claustrophobic just because it takes place in space capsules.  I think this may be more pertinent to, or descriptive of our situation even than instances where authors like Kim Stanley Robinson take global warming seriously and work it into their versions of the future.  I don’t see any reason to think that Fforde is pushing willful ignorance.  When he casually reveals that his characters are speaking Welsh, it produces what has to be a deliberate loss of balance.  The climate has changed things profoundly.  There are other examples of this, and of course a lot of starvation.

* Bernoullize was used by Leibniz to mean doing mathematics, in homage to the Bernoulli family.

Bad Blood

My Kindle notes and highlights for this book were more profane than usual.  At times the spleen got so out of hand that I found myself cooling it down a little in view of whatever use might be made of my annotations.  That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy it.  I did, in much the same way as I enjoy the rare plane crash or industrial accident story where the people who suffer are the same ones who override safety measures out of pure, arrogant self indulgence.

Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup tells the story of the now defunct medical technology startup Theranos.  Three years ago Theranos was hailed as a wondrous unicorn, a once in a generation venture promising life changing innovation and staggering profitability.  Estimates for the value of the company (it was never taken public) hit $10 billion dollars.  Then the author of this book, John Carreyrou of the Wall Street Journal (they’re good for something I guess), started questioning some of Theranos’ claims.  Now they’ve ceased to exist; their technology never existed at all.

That purported technology was going to allow any of hundreds of blood tests to be run on a single drop of blood pricked from a fingertip.  The tests would run on tabletop sized, wirelessly networked machines located in drugstores and homes.  Mainly, I think, because tiny blood samples are so hard to handle without corrupting, Theranos was never able to perform more than a few tests, and those with dubious accuracy.  This did not stop them from forming partnerships, notably with Walgreens, which they touted as groundbreaking successes with just a few kinks to be worked out.  Meanwhile they were mailing blood samples to be tested on conventional machines.  It seems that Theranos was able to get away with their fraud as long as they did because they were selling a plan of decentralized, personal, on demand medical care as much as they were selling any particular new technology.  In business parlance, they were being disruptive.

Does it still seem to you that something like this should never have been allowed to happen?  How could people put money like this into an untested concept?  That’s what makes this story so delightful.  Theranos gave the business world exactly what it wanted, and it was complete bullshit.  Carreyrou gives most of the credit to Elizabeth Holmes, the company’s founder.  She dropped out of Stanford after her freshman year and started the company, largely, it seems, on the strength of recommendations from a reputable professor.  She was charming, but also monomaniacal, a fanatic, a tyrant.  Former employees reported on harangues where she talked in religious tones of making the most important thing the world had ever seen.  Ubiquitous security cameras, fingerprint readers, surveillance of email, and even bulletproof glass were deployed, allegedly to protect Theranos’ intellectual property.  She aped Steve Jobs’ turtleneck.

Among the people who fell for this act were two former secretaries of state and the current secretary of defense: Henry Kissinger, George Schultz, and General James Mattis.  I don’t know if I’ve gotten over this yet.  These supposed elder statesmen, people who held life and death over this planet, agreed to sit on the board and preside over a lie.  George Schultz took the company’s side against his own grandson when the younger man tried to blow the whistle.  What was it for?  I didn’t get the sense that those men in particular stood to make a whole lot of money.  That was for Rupert Murdoch, who put in $100 million of his own fortune and took a tax write off when it tanked.  They were essentially selling their names to the company, I guess to be involved with the next big thing, and to exercise their undeserved, abstract authority.  Per Wikipedia, Betsy DeVos also invested, and Holmes got involved with fundraising for Hillary Clinton.

I’ve seen some articles about Theranos and about the book that would downplay the significance of the whole thing.  A few millionaire investors lost money.  A few people got scary blood test results.  Some employees got hurt (and that’s actually the saddest story in the book) but what did that ever count for?  We should all have known from the get go that Silicon Valley is prone to a little hype.  And of course many people don’t need the help making up their minds about Republican cabinet members.  I think there are aggravating factors.  The involvement such establishment giants as Kissinger is one.  The fact that it was medicine that was being attempted, and not social media or rocket planes is another.  The failure of ego and greed is so sparklingly clear.  The book is a license for cynicism and even hostility towards bosses, money and fame.  It could drive you to read someone like Howard Zinn or Thomas Piketty.  And I do like a good disaster story.

Languages of Nature

 

Frederik Sjoberg’s entomological memoir The Fly Trap deserves much better than my month late musings, but here they are.

The titular fly trap is the Malaise trap, an essential piece of entomological collecting equipment devised in the early twentieth century by the Swede Rene Malaise, when he noticed that flies had a tendency to collect in the highest corner of his tent.  Malaise made several extraordinary collecting journeys, to Kamchatka and Southeast Asia, and uncovering something of the man is one of the driving forces behind Sjoberg’s book.

Sjoberg’s own interest is in one way the polar opposite of Malaise’s: for years Sjoberg collected only on the island of Runmaro, not far from Stockholm, and mostly in his own garden.  He found more than two hundred species of hoverflies in this way, these being members of the widespread but rather inconspicuous insect family Syrphidae.  Some of these harmless creatures are very convincing mimics of wasps and bees, which is a source of amusing aggravation when the entomologist is accosted by ignorant summer vacationers.

Insect Collection, from Wikimedia Commons, CC BY David McClenaghan and CISRO

It bears remembering that in common with many other insect taxa, there remain many things about the life history and distribution of hoverflies, and no doubt many species, that are unknown to science.  Many of Malaise’s specimens lie unsorted in museums to this day.  Hence it is possible for the dedicated hobbyist (it’s not clear but I gather that Sjoberg supported himself with translation, and perhaps the civility of the Swedish state) to make real contributions that are truly appreciated by a small community of specialists.  Amongst them, memories are long and the appetite for new reports tremendous; after a long summer of collecting Sjoberg describes settling in for the winter with his cabinets and writing to his colleagues about his most interesting discoveries.

He talks about the Legendary Flies, and it’s really hardly funny at all; it’s awe inspiring, these animals that are seen twice in a century, if that.  He tells the incredible story of the Fly Tree, a giant which stood for centuries in a Swedish town until it was brought down with dynamite by insane government busybodies.  It was so named because every summer night it was surrounded by a cloud of flies, some of which are speculated to have bred only in pools of water that collected high in the trunks of ancient trees.  Where are they now?

Birds are my current pursuit in the domain of natural history, and I asked myself if there are legendary birds.  There have been so many people looking for the Ivory Billed Woodpecker that it’s very hard to believe that it’s not extinct.  Others, like the condors, whooping cranes, or Kirtland’s warbler, they are extremely rare, but, still, I think, more accessible than the Legendary Flies.  Something I have yet to attain to.  On the other hand, Sjoberg’s discussion of learning natural history the way one learns a language is, I think, quite widely applicable and accessible.  He has invested so much time in learning hoverflies because reading the Book of Nature is so pleasurable.  Simply looking is pleasurable as well, but that’s not all there is.  I’ve learned that one has to know at a glance many species of warblers to feel the full impact of a really busy day of spring migration.  One has to go out a lot, and listen carefully, to really appreciate the explosion of cedar waxwings in Boston in the first week of June.

I’m wondering what language I want to learn next.

Rocks with Guts

I’ve just read a book about freshwater mussel conservation.  While I’m sure I could just as well have read a similar book about frogs or bats or sedges, I’m pleased to report that Sarah Gascho Landis’ Immersion is a fairly decent example of the genre.  And mussels may just be especially weird, hence the quote in the title of this post.

Some freshwater mussels (U. S. Fish and Wildlife)

I’m a bit of an amateur naturalist, but I’ve barely paid attention to mussels.  Perhaps nondescript shells don’t seem very remarkable when they turn up on the banks of a slow moving but seemingly healthy river.  Or maybe studying them in situ doesn’t seem worth the effort.  Landis has some good stories about that, searching for mussels in rivers choked with (sometimes full) beer bottles, dead cats, or simply a big snag that seems determined to drown someone.  What I find interesting, though, is the mollusks’ ability to hide and turn up in the strangest places or under the worst circumstances.  I still remember finding a huge black crawdad crawling through the grass on a rain soaked roadside.  Mussels have a similar ability to push the boundaries of their aquatic habitat and run up against our terrestrial ways.  I’m fascinated by the idea of hundred year old bivalves in the deep eddies of tiny, rocky creeks far up in the mountains.  There are even mussels that live in ponds!

A mussel displays her lure.  (U. S. Fish and Wildlife)

How do they do it?  Fish, mostly.  Landis is apparently mesmerized by the mussel reproductive cycle, and it is pretty amazing.  Mussels don’t come together to mate; female mussels must capture free floating sperm from the water.  Once they have nursed a brood of baby mussels, many mussels rely on a fish to host the babies, and then release them elsewhere.  Lampmussels deploy an astounding minnow shaped lure to bring in a predatory fish and then reward them with gillsful of mussel larvae.  Some mussels have evolved the ability to defeat the immune response only of specific fish; overall, it’s a specialized and vulnerable reproductive strategy.  Fish, mussels, and thousands of tiny streams throughout the piedmont region of the American southeast have somehow combined to produce a hotspot of unrivaled biodiversity, including some three hundred mussels species.  I wish Landis had tried to say a little more about the long term evolution of the group; it seems like it would be a fascinating story.

The Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway is a massively disruptive 200 mile link between the Tennessee and Mobile Rivers

Lately mussels have taken a tremendous amount of abuse.  Droughts, water pollution, and the complete restructuring of watersheds are taking an even greater toll than the freshwater pearl and button crazes of the late nineteenth century.  Of the three hundred or more species of lampmussels, snuffboxes, pigtoes, pistolgrips, etc., dozens are federally listed.  Landis has a few heartening stories of mussels rebounding in habitats that were completely dried or polluted to death.  Often these successes came through a lot of hard scientific work (a mussel hatchery sounds like a daunting engineering project) and enforcement of environmental law.  Overall, though, the outlook does not seem good.  There are different ways of looking at this.  Landis presents the case that mussels are a convenient measure of the overall peril of water pollution.  She also writes movingly in a more personal register of the intrinsic value of biodiversity.  She says that learning to see mussels is like discovering a hidden library.  Even if I never see more than a handful of these species, I know that I want to live in a world that boasts of these strange “rocks with guts”.