Around ten years ago, Stewart Brand, the founder of the “Whole Earth Catalog,” and George Church, a Harvard geneticist, met in Boston. Brand had an interest in using genetic technology for conservation, and when Church said that he read and wrote DNA, Brand told me, “that got my attention.” Reading DNA had been done before, but writing DNA was something new. The two hit it off and have been collaborating on a project to resurrect the woolly mammoth, the giant Arctic elephant that went extinct ten thousand years ago. Church is a pioneer in genetic technology—he helped develop the CRISPR-Cas9 technology that a researcher in China recently used on the world’s first genetically edited newborns—and, in his lab, scientists are working on bringing the prehistoric pachyderm back from extinction. The process would involve adding certain mammoth genetic adaptations, like a long, dense pelt and layers of insulating fat, to the DNA of Asian elephants, which share more than ninety-nine per cent of their DNA with their extinct cousins. Church and Brand have a vision of herds of future mammoths grazing the steppes of the far north.
Church’s woolly mammoth research is just one of several de-extinction projects—there are about ten underway now—that aim to use genetics to restore lost species. In her book “The Re-Origin of Species,” the Swedish science journalist Torill Kornfeldt travels the world meeting the scientists and conservationists involved in this movement. In California, she talks with Ben Novak, a scientist obsessed with bringing back the passenger pigeon—a bird that once travelled in flocks that were so giant and dense, Novak tells her, that they “swept through the landscape, with the same effect as forest fires.” In upstate New York, a researcher is working toward restoring the American chestnut, which was decimated by blight in the late eighteen-hundreds. Until then, chestnuts were so prevalent in the eastern half of the United States that, when their white blossoms fell in the spring, the hillsides looked like they were covered in snow; in the fall, their sweet, starchy nuts served as a free, abundant harvest. At Australia’s Sea Simulator aquarium, resurrection scientists are working on coral, which faces an existential threat from the rapid warming and acidifying of ocean waters. These researchers want to help coral avoid extinction by “trying to nudge evolution,” imbuing them with traits that will allow them to survive the hotter oceans of the future.
I’ve long understood that the dangers of global warming are real and rising. I’ve seen its power firsthand in the form of receding glaciers, dried lake beds, and Sierra tree stands taken down by bark beetles.
This is the first time, though, that I smelled and tasted it in my home.
Obviously, a sore throat and a flight change are trivial compared with the lives and homes lost in the Camp Fire. But after I spent a week living under a haze of smoke, it did resonate on a deeper level that we’re really going to let this happen.
It can be hard for criticism to cohere when it’s perforated by ambivalence. A rave coasts along, buoyed by enthusiasm. A pan serves up the dramatic tension on a platter: The people trying to sell you a book (or movie or play) insist that it’s great, and here’s why it’s unremittingly awful. Mixed feelings are trickier, and more vulnerable. They’re like unstable elements waiting to be pulled into a wishy-washy middle ground.
Reading “The Earth Dies Streaming,” a collection of film writing by A. S. Hamrah, you realize it doesn’t have to be this way. As the resident movie critic of the journal n+1, Hamrah is committed to his ambivalence, conveying it with a mixture of precision and conviction that will remind you how much more there is to be gleaned from a review than whether a movie is “good” or “bad” (even if it’s a movie you happen to deem very good or very bad indeed).
Job insecurity and wage inequality have been rising ever since the years of Reagan and Thatcher, but the advent of digital technology has exacerbated this trend, making it easier for companies such as Uber to assemble and manage large armies of low-paid contract employees. Whatever these workers might gain in flexibility is more than cancelled out by the disadvantages: “gig economy” work invariably means no health insurance, no retirement pension, no child-care provisions or paid holidays – all things Stephen DeWitt, the CEO of a startup selling “labour clouds” of freelance contractors, breezily dismisses as “old-model inefficiencies”. Citing evidence linking chronic mild stress to declining mental health, increasing antidepressant usage and rising suicide rates, Lyons reminds us that an economy built on insecurity is a public health time bomb. It is a cruel paradox that the very workers who are enervated by long-hours culture are expected to surrender ever more of their depleted emotional energy to their employers. Competence alone no longer cuts it; Lyons interviewed one woman whose boss fired her because she didn’t “seem excited enough”.
When the dirty covert money slowed, universities had to create alternative sources of revenue. For Dave Frohnmayer, former president of University of Oregon, raising tuition rates and out-of-state enrollment was not enough to cover the cuts in state funding. Then the football team played in the 1995 Rose Bowl. Though they fell to Penn State, they did win the attention of Phil Knight, founder and CEO of Nike.
University of Nike by Joshua Hunt gives a compelling account of what happened next in the ongoing story of the commercialization of higher education. Written in short clips that pivot between several story lines, Hunt’s book has a remarkable sense of pace that turns what might be considered a sludgy read into a page-turner. The race between Pepsi and Coca-Cola to close exclusive deals with public school systems reads as suspenseful as a late drive in the fourth quarter to win a championship.
After a few moments, the door on the right behind the lectern opened and in came Allen Ginsberg, bald and black-bearded and wearing black rimmed glasses, followed by his constant companion Peter Orlovsky, who had long grey hair that he’d put up in a ponytail that hung down to his bottom; a young boy carrying a guitar; and Ginsberg’s Hungarian translator, István Eörsi, a lecturer at the university. Ginsberg unpacked his harmonium slowly and sat down in lotus position on top of the long desk at the front of the room. He started: “Tiger, tiger burning bright, in the forests of the night,” and the crowd chanted with him. I knew nothing about Ginsberg’s “Blake vision,” an auditory hallucination he had in 1948 when he heard William Blake reciting his poetry, but Ginsberg’s voice was mesmerizing, shamanic, and ultimately transformative. I was in bliss for the next hour.
Ginsberg’s prose-poems are heavily reliant not only on imagery but on repetition and an internal rhythm, which gives them a mantra-like power, mirroring his Buddhist faith. Many people indeed thought that Allen Ginsberg was a prophet—not of the Buddhist faith, but of freedom of speech.
This new 12-story cycle, Turbulence, stretches its horizons to encompass the entire globe, as well as the female perspectives rigorously excluded from his previous book. Putting a girdle round the Earth in just 130-odd pages, it’s inevitably a much leaner work, written in a brisk, authoritative past tense rather than a layered and shifting present. Neatly organised as a series of plane journeys in which the narrative focus is passed between a dozen different characters, it begins and ends in London with a stifled fiftysomething Englishman awaiting the results of his cancer treatment. “Ironic, mocking and evasive”, Jamie is a familiar Szalay character, forced at last to accept his daughter’s insistence that “some things are serious. Which is frightening.” In between we spend time with a Senegalese businessman, an Indian caretaker living in Qatar and a Hong Kong academic, among others.