Why It's So Disturbingly Common for Water Regulation to Fail
A Secret Tunnel Found in Mexico May Finally Solve the Mysteries of Teotihuacán
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Living Happily Ever After
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Why It's So Disturbingly Common for Water Regulation to Fail
What happened in Flint reflects an environmental bureaucracy too easily tripped up by local politics.

LAURA BLISS

@mslaurabliss
Joel Beauvais, acting deputy assistant administrator, Office of Water, EPA; Keith Creagh, director,
Department of Environmental Quality, State of Michigan; Marc Edwards, Virginia Tech professor,
Environmental and Water Resources Engineering: and Flint resident LeeAnne Walters, are sworn in on
Capitol Hill. (AP Photo/Molly Rile)
The Texas border towns of Rio Bravo and El Cenizo had always lacked adequate drinking water, back to their
founding as colonias by unscrupulous developers in the 1980s, when the Rio Bravo Water Treatment
Plant opened in 2006. The citizens, predominantly poor and Latino, hoped their troubles would be washed
away.
But the $12 million, state-of-the-art plant didn’t work. The water smelled and came out in peculiar colors.
Almost immediately residents complained about stomach problems and skin rashes to Webb County officials,
and eventually to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, which issued some violations. But it
wasn’t until 2013 that the TCEQ, alongside the Texas Rangers, launched investigations that found the county
had been falsifying water quality records all along. In 2015, one county employee pled guilty to criminal
charges, while TCEQ was probed for not having done more about the dysfunctional plant.
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How Democracy Died in Flint
Toxic water, a marginalized community, and a regulator locked in a long stalemate with a public
agency: Sound familiar? The same forces shaped the story on a larger scale in Flint, Michigan. Similar tales
are unfolding inCalifornia’s Central Valley, Nashville’s suburbs, and the plateaus of Ohio.
Why, time after time, does this pattern emerge? Why don’t water agencies always provide safe drinking
water, and why don’t regulators always regulate?
Manuel Teodoro, an associate professor of political science at Texas A&M University, studies the people
behind environmental regulations, and why they make the decisions they do. As the story of Flint rises to
international attention, his research sheds light on how things can go so terribly wrong.
The case of Flint
In 2014, Flint was under the control of a state-appointed emergency manager.As a cost-saving measure, the
manager switched Flint’s water source to the local Flint River, gaining approval from the Michigan
Department of Environmental Quality (MDEQ), which enforces EPA water standards. But the river water was
corrosive, and for 18 months it caused lead to leach from the city’s pipes. Now nine people are dead from a
Legionnaire’s outbreak that may be linked to the water’s improper treatment, thousands of children have been
exposed to dangerous levels of lead, and miles of infrastructure have been ruined.
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Multiple investigations have been launched by the state and federal government, and they could end in
charges of involuntary manslaughter. Fingers are flying between MDEQ and the federal EPA.(City officials
are also implicated in Flint’s crisis, but because Flint was under state management when it switched to the
Flint River, the accusations fall mainly between MDEQ and EPA.)
Some salient questions: Why did MDEQ fail to insist that Flint include a corrosive control in the water? Why
didn’t it act when outside evidence suggested that the water was toxic? Why didn’t the EPA force MDEQ to
do more when it learned that Flint’s water did not comply with Safe Drinking Water Act standards? And why
didn’t it make that information public as quickly as possible?
There are no certain answers yet. But Teodoro says there are some broad truths about environmental
regulations that can offer some understanding for what went wrong in Flint—not to mention Rio Bravo, El
Cenizo, and beyond.
Local politics affect compliance
One crucial concept is environmental federalism, the basic enforcement structure underlying America’s big
environmental protection laws. The federal government sets environmental standards, such as the Safe
Drinking Water Act. States are the “primacy agencies” charged with implementing and enforcing those
standards on a local level. Local governments and public water districts are supposed to comply with the state
(and, by extension, the feds).
But environmental federalism creates some common trip-ups. First of all, “local and state politics always
affect compliance,” says Teodoro. Local governments might determine that the cost of complying with
federal and state standards is simply too high, too burdensome, or too politically onerous. For instance,
compliance might require raising water rates, a risky move for local leaders seeking reelection. Or maybe the
local population served by the water agency is politically marginalized, and thus deemed unworthy of the
funding necessary for compliance.
That’s where environmental injustice can enter the picture. In a research paper under peer review, Teodoro
and doctoral candidate David Switzer analyze local government violations of the Safe Drinking Water Act
from all over the U.S. They found that in communities with low socioeconomic status, race and ethnicity were
extremely strong predictors of high numbers of violations. In other words, poor black and Latino communities
are more likely to get stuck with bad water.
“This can’t just be a consequence of source-water quality,” Teodoro says. “It’s partly that officials are
deciding where to put resources towards compliance, and it has these racial and ethnic effects.”
Government can’t touch government
Water-quality violations aren’t just the result of decisions made at a local level. States, and ultimately the
EPA, are supposed to check that environmental standards are being enforced. Can’t states just crack down on
any local agency that flagrantly violates them, and can’t the feds crack down on the states that don’t care?
Yes, but it’s complicated. Neither state and federal enforcers have that many levers they can pull to punish the
agencies below them.
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Flint resident Jerry Adkisson and his children carry bottled water they picked up from a fire station.
(REUTERS/Rebecca Cook)
Technically, states can fine non-compliant cities, and the EPA can fine non-compliant states. And the EPA
can revoke the state’s oversight authority, just as states can put water systems into receivership. And
sometimes these things do happen.
But as I wrote in July 2015 about Teodoro’s previous research, fining a city is essentially punishing the public
that both government bodies are supposed to serve. Fines take away public funds that could be directed
towards compliance; they essentially encourage more violations, not less. And because local public utilities
are often monopoly providers of essential services, regulator threats to revoke their licenses are often empty
ones. It’s not like the EPA can shut down the city of Baltimore, or the Tennessee Valley Authority, when they
fail to comply with federal standards—that would be depriving citizens of the only service provider around.
All told, this structure can add up to a game of “catch me if you can”: local governments make risky
decisions, knowing their regulators won’t do much to punish them.
One big dysfunctional family
The relationships between EPA regulators, state enforcers, and local water providers are just that—
relationships. More specifically, they are ongoing connections between human beings caught up in big
bureaucracies, shaped by all sorts of interests from inside and out.
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Daniel J. Fiorino is the director of the Center for Environmental Policy at the School of Public Affairs at
American University, a position he accepted after 31 years of working on policy at the EPA. Describing how
EPA officials work with their counterparts at the state level, he says: “I often compare it to family
relationships. You may not all get along, you may have different perspectives, but you’re in the same space
and you have to learn to work together.”
Invariably, that means there can be tension, resentment, and sensitivity. So when an EPA official finds a state
environmental agency has made a violation, the first move isn’t necessarily going to be issuing a fine or
making a public statement. Rather, in the interest of preserving its working relationship with that state, the
EPA might quietly nudge state officials towards compliance.
“I compare it to family relationships. You may not get along, but you have to work together.”
Another force that encourages the EPA to act with discretion is the fact that it’s been
a controversial agency since its inception. “The level of conflict and criticism has risen in recent years,” says
Fiorino. “We have people seriously running for president saying that we don’t need an EPA or a Clean Air
Act. So that can make an agency very cautious and reluctant about appearing alarmist or like it’s taking over
for the state.”
But none of this is to excuse what happened in Flint. As FOIA-obtained email evidence shows, MDEQ
resisted taking responsibility for Flint’s problems long after the EPA flagged them. Still, rather than assert its
authority, the EPA stayed behind the scenes, and even went so far as to allegedly silence one of its own
experts who was sounding alarm bells.
It took the EPA nearly a year to admit that it hadn’t acted as forcefully as it could have. MDEQ, as the
primacy agency charged with upholding Safe Drinking Water Act standards, failed from the start, and took
nearly 18 months to admit it. Clearly, these regulatory games and tactics went on far too long.
“You’d like to think that the bureaucrats in power would get that there are children drinking lead,” says
Teodoro. “You’d like to think that some kind of humanitarian instinct kicks in and they decide that they’re
going public.”
Alas, in Flint, that instinct never kicked in. Instead it took outsiders—a doctor, a scientist, and an outraged
mom—to shake MDEQ and EPA officials awake from their bureaucratic trance. It’d be great if next time they
snapped out of it themselves, but these patterns suggest the structure of environmental regulation is in need of
significant change.
http://www.citylab.com/crime/2016/02/flint-water-crisis-epa-regulationsmdeq/462444/?utm_source=nl__link2_021616
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A Secret Tunnel Found in Mexico May Finally Solve the Mysteries of Teotihuacán
The chance discovery beneath a nearly 2,000-year-old pyramid leads to the heart of a lost civilization
image: http://thumbs.media.smithsonianmag.com//filer/ba/4d/ba4d1156-8c5c-4bab-8a0163e8e4ed5a9b/jun2016_c03_teotihuacan.jpg__800x600_q85_crop.jpg
The Temple of the Plumed Serpent is adorned with carved snake heads and slithering bodies. (Janet Jarman)
By Matthew Shaer; Photographs by Janet Jarman
SMITHSONIAN MAGAZINE | SUBSCRIBE
JUNE 2016
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In the fall of 2003, a heavy rainstorm swept through the ruins of Teotihuacán, the pyramid-studded, pre-Aztec
metropolis 30 miles northeast of present-day Mexico City. Dig sites sloshed over with water; a torrent of mud
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and debris coursed past rows of souvenir stands at the main entrance. The grounds of the city’s central
courtyard buckled and broke. One morning, Sergio Gómez, an archaeologist with Mexico’s National Institute
of Anthropology and History, arrived at work to find a nearly three-foot-wide sinkhole had opened at the foot
of a large pyramid known as the Temple of the Plumed Serpent, in Teotihuacán’s southeast quadrant.
“My first thought was, ‘What exactly am I looking at?’” Gómez told me recently. “The second was, ‘How
exactly are we going to fix this?’”
Gómez is wiry and small, with pronounced cheekbones, nicotine-stained fingers and a helmet of dense black
hair that adds a couple of inches to his height. He has spent the past three decades—almost all of his
professional career—working in and around Teotihuacán, which once, long ago, served as a cosmopolitan
center of the Mesoamerican world. He is fond of saying that there are few living humans who know the place
as intimately as he does.
And as far as he was concerned, there wasn’t anything beneath the Temple of the Plumed Serpent beyond dirt,
fossils and rock. Gómez fetched a flashlight from his truck and aimed it into the sinkhole. Nothing: only
darkness. So he tied a line of heavy rope around his waist and, with several colleagues holding onto the other
end, he descended into the murk.
Gómez came to rest in the middle of what appeared to be a man-made tunnel. “I could make out some of the
ceiling,” he told me, “but the tunnel itself was blocked in both directions by these immense stones.”
In designing Teotihuacán (pronounced tay-oh-tee-wah-KAHN), the city’s architects had arranged the major
monuments on a north-south axis, with the so-called “Avenue of the Dead” linking the largest structure, the
Temple of the Sun, with the Ciudadela, the southeasterly courtyard that housed the Temple of the Plumed
Serpent. Gómez knew that archaeologists had previously discovered a narrow tunnel underneath the Temple
of the Sun. He theorized that he was now looking at a kind of mirror tunnel, leading to a subterranean
chamber beneath the Temple of the Plumed Serpent. If he was correct, it would be a find of stunning
proportions—the type of achievement that can make a career.
“The problem was,” he told me, “you can’t just dive in and start tearing up earth. You have to have a clear
hypothesis, and you have to get approval.”
Gómez set about making his plans. He erected a tent over the sinkhole, to keep it away from the prying eyes
of the hundreds of thousands of tourists who visit Teotihuacán each year, and with the help of the National
Institute of Anthropology and History arranged for the delivery of a lawnmower-size, high-resolution,
ground-penetrating radar device. Beginning in the early months of 2004, he and a handpicked team of some
20 archaeologists and workers scanned the earth under the Ciudadela, returning every afternoon to upload the
results to Gómez’s computers. By 2005, the digital map was complete.
As Gómez had suspected, the tunnel ran approximately 330 feet from the Ciudadela to the center of the
Temple of the Plumed Serpent. The hole that had appeared during the 2003 storms was not the actual
entrance; that lay a few yards back, and it had apparently been intentionally sealed with large boulders nearly
2,000 years ago. Whatever was inside that tunnel, Gómez thought to himself, was meant to stay hidden
forever.
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image: http://thumbs.media.smithsonianmag.com//filer/0f/f1/0ff1464b-7874-4f2f-a2ea626141bda44b/jun2016_c08_teotihuacan.jpg__60x60_q85_crop
Gómez believes the tunnel is “one of the most important discoveries in the history of Mexico.” (Janet Jarman)
**********
Teotihuacán has long stood as the greatest of Mesoamerican mysteries: the site of a colossal and influential
culture about which frustratingly little is understood, from the conditions of its rise to the circumstances of its
collapse to its actual name. Teotihuacán translates as “the place where men become gods” in Nahuatl, the
language of the Aztecs, who likely found the ruins of the deserted city sometime in the 1300s, centuries after
its abandonment, and concluded that a powerful ur-culture—an ancestor of theirs—must have once resided in
its vast temples.
The city lies in a basin at the southernmost edge of the Mexican Plateau, an undulating landmass that forms
the spine of modern-day Mexico. Inside the basin the climate is mild, the land riven by streams and rivers—
ideal conditions for farming and raising livestock.
Teotihuacán itself was likely settled as early as 400 B.C., but it was only around A.D. 100, an era of robust
population growth and increased urbanization in Mesoamerica, that the metropolis as we know it, with its
wide boulevards and monumental pyramids, was built. Some historians have theorized that its founders were
refugees driven north by the eruption of a volcano. Others have speculated that they were Totonacs, a tribe
from the east.
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Whatever the case, the Teotihuacanos, as they are now known, proved themselves to be skilled urban
planners. They built stone-sided canals to reroute the San Juan River directly under the Avenue of the Dead,
and set about constructing the pyramids that would form the city’s core: the Temple of the Plumed Serpent,
the even larger 147-foot-tall Temple of the Moon and the bulky, sky-obscuring 213-foot-tall Temple of the
Sun.
Clemency Coggins, a professor emerita of archaeology and art history at Boston University, has suggested
that the city was designed as a physical manifestation of its founders’ creation myth. “Not only was
Teotihuacán laid out in a measured rectangular grid, but the pattern was oriented to the movement of the sun,
which was born there,” Coggins has written. She is far from the only historian to see the city as large-scale
metaphor. Michael Coe, an archaeologist at Yale, argued in the 1980s that individual structures might be
representations of the emergence of humankind out of a vast and tumultuous sea. (As is in Genesis,
Mesoamericans of the time are thought to have envisioned the world as being born from complete darkness,
in this case aqueous.) Consider the Temple of the Plumed Serpent, Coe suggested—the same temple that hid
Sergio Gómez’s tunnel. The structure’s facade was splashed with what Coggins called “marine motifs”: shells
and what appear to be waves. Coe wrote that the temple represents the “initial creation of the universe from a
watery void.”
image: http://thumbs.media.smithsonianmag.com//filer/85/a4/85a44ff9-48bc-4f2e-ba9b60974c9c48cf/jun2016_c09_teotihuacan.jpg__60x60_q85_crop
Hot-air balloons float above Teotihuacán just after dawn. In the foreground is the Pyramid of the Moon, with
the Pyramid of the Sun in the distance. (Janet Jarman)
Recent evidence suggests that the religion practiced in these pyramids bore a resemblance to the religion
practiced in the contemporaneous Mayan cities of Tikal and El Mirador, hundreds of miles to the southeast:
the worshiping of the sun and moon and stars; the veneration of a Quetzalcoatl-like plumed serpent; the
frequent occurrence, in painting and sculpture, of a jaguar that doubles as deity and protector of men.
Yet peaceful ritual was apparently not always enough to sustain the Teotihuacanos’ connection to their gods.
In 2004, Saburo Sugiyama, an anthropologist from the University of Japan and Arizona State University, who
has spent decades studying Teotihuacán, and Rubén Cabrera, of Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology
and History, located a vault under the Temple of the Moon that held the remains of an array of wild animals,
including jungle cats and eagles, along with 12 human corpses, ten missing their heads. “It is hard to believe
that the ritual consisted of clean symbolic performances,” Sugiyama said at the time. “It is most likely that the
ceremony created a horrible scene of bloodshed with sacrificed people and animals.”
Between A.D. 150 and 300, Teotihuacán grew rapidly. Locals harvested beans, avocados, peppers and squash
on fields raised in the middle of shallow lakes and swampland—a technique known as chinampa—and kept
chickens and turkeys. Several heavily trafficked trade routes were established, linking Teotihuacán to
obsidian quarries in Pachuca and cacao groves near the Gulf of Mexico. Cotton came in from the Pacific
Coast, ceramics from Veracruz.
By A.D. 400, Teotihuacán had become the most powerful and influential city in the region. Residential
neighborhoods sprang up in concentric circles around the city center, eventually comprising thousands of
individual family dwellings, not dissimilar to single-story apartments, that together may have housed 200,000
people.
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image:
http://thumbs.media.smithsonianmag.com//embedly/JUN16_Cover.super.mini.jpg.300x0_q85_upscale.jpg
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Recent fieldwork by scholars like David Carballo, of Boston University, has revealed the sheer diversity of
the citizenry of Teotihuacán: Judging by artifacts and paintings found inside surviving structures, residents
came to Teotihuacán from as far afield as Chiapas and the Yucatán. There were likely Mayan neighborhoods,
and Zapotec ones. As the scholar Miguel Angel Torres, an official at Mexico’s National Institute for
Anthropology and History, told me recently, Teotihuacán was probably one of the first major melting pots in
the Western Hemisphere. “I believe that the city grew a little like modern Manhattan,” Torres says. “You
walk around through these different neighborhoods: Spanish Harlem, Chinatown, Koreatown. But together,
the city functions as one, in harmony.”
The harmony did not last. There is a hint, in the demolition of some of the sculptures that adorn the temples
and monuments, of periodic regime change in the ruling class of Teotihuacán; and, in the depiction of shieldand spear-toting warriors, of clashes with other local city-states. Perhaps, as several archaeologists suggested
to me, civil war swept through Teotihuacán, culminating in a fire that seems to have damaged vast sections of
the interior of the city around A.D. 550. Perhaps the fire was caused by a visiting army. Perhaps a large-scale
migration occurred.
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In A.D. 750, nearly 700 years after it was established, the city of Teotihuacán was abandoned, its monuments
still filled with treasures and artifacts and bones, its buildings left to be eaten by the surrounding brush. The
former residents of Teotihuacán, if they were not killed, were presumably absorbed into the populations of
neighboring cultures, or returned along the established trade routes to the lands where their ancestral kin still
lived throughout the Mesoamerican world.
They took their secrets with them. Today, even after more than a century of excavation at the site, there is an
extraordinary amount we do not know about the Teotihuacanos. They did have some kind of quasihieroglyphic written language, but we haven’t cracked it; we don’t know what tongue was spoken inside the
city, or even what the natives called the place. We have a conception of the religion they practiced, but we
don’t know much about the priestly class, or the relative piety of the city’s citizenry, or the makeup of the
courts or the military. We don’t know exactly what led to the city’s founding, or who ruled over it during its
half-millennium of dominance, or what exactly caused its fall. As Matthew Robb, the curator of
Mesoamerican art at San Francisco’s de Young Museum, told me, “This city wasn’t designed to answer our
questions.”
In archaeology and anthropology circles—to say nothing of the popular press—Sergio Gómez’s discovery
was greeted as a major turning point in Teotihuacán studies. The tunnel under the Temple of the Sun had been
largely emptied by looters before archaeologists could get to it in the 1990s. But Gómez’s tunnel had been
sealed off for some 1,800 years: Its treasures would be pristine.
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In 2009, the government granted Gómez permission to dig, and he broke ground at the entrance of the tunnel,
where he installed a staircase and ladders that would allow easy access to the subterranean site. He moved at a
painstaking pace: inches at a time, a few feet every month. Excavating was done manually, with spades.
Nearly 1,000 tons of earth were removed from the tunnel; after each new segment was cleared, Gómez
brought in a 3-D scanner to document his progress.
The haul was tremendous. There were seashells, cat bones, pottery. There were fragments of human skin.
There were elaborate necklaces. There were rings and wood and figurines. Everything was deposited
deliberately and pointedly, as if in offering. The picture was coming into focus for Gómez: This was not a
place where ordinary residents could tread.
A university in Mexico City donated a pair of robots, Tlaloque and Tláloc II, playfully named for Aztec rain
deities whose images appear in early iterations throughout Teotihuacán, to inspect deeper inside the tunnel,
including the final stretch, which descended, on a ramp, an extra ten feet into the earth. Like mechanical
moles, the robots chewed through the soil, their camera lights aglow, and returned with hard drives full of
spectacular footage: The tunnel seemed to end in a spacious cross-shaped chamber, piled high with more
jewelry and several statues.
It was here, Gómez hoped, that he’d make his biggest find yet.
image: http://thumbs.media.smithsonianmag.com//filer/30/b1/30b193f8-f80e-4088-b1493c71b7ef8727/jun2016_c01_teotihuacan.jpg__60x60_q85_crop_
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I met Gómez late last year, on a smoldering afternoon. He was smoking a cigarette and drinking coffee out of
a foam cup. Tides of tourists swept to and fro over the grass of the Ciudadela—I heard scraps of Italian,
Russian, French. An Asian couple stopped to peer in at Gómez and his team as if they were tigers at a zoo.
Gómez looked back stonily, the cigarette hanging off his bottom lip.
Gómez told me about the work his team was doing to study the 75,000 or so artifacts they had already found,
each of which needed to be carefully cataloged, analyzed and, when possible, restored. “I would estimate that
we’re only about 10 percent through the process,” he said.
The restoration operation is set up in a cluster of buildings not far from the Ciudadela. In one room, a young
man was sketching artifacts and noting where in the tunnel the objects had been found. Next door, a handful
of conservators sat at a banquet-style table, bent over an array of pottery. The air smelled sharply of acetone
and alcohol, a mixture used to remove contaminants from the artifacts.
“It might take you months just to finish a single large piece,” Vania García, a technician from Mexico City,
told me. She was using a syringe primed with acetone to clean a particularly tiny crack. “But some of the
other objects are remarkably well preserved: They were buried carefully.” She recalled that not long ago, she
found a powdery yellow substance at the bottom of a jar. It was corn, it turned out—1,800-year-old corn.
Passing through a lab where wood recovered from the tunnel was being carefully treated in chemical baths,
we stepped into the storeroom. “This is where we keep the fully restored artifacts,” Gómez said. There was a
statue of a coiled jaguar, poised to pounce, and a collection of flawless obsidian knives. The material for the
weapons had probably been brought in from the Pachuca region of Mexico and carved in Teotihuacán by
master craftspeople. Gómez held out a knife for me to hold; it was marvelously light. “What a society, no?”
he exclaimed. “That could create something as beautiful and powerful as that.”
In the canvas tent erected over the entrance to the tunnel, Gómez’s team had installed a ladder that led down
into the earth—a wobbly thing fastened to the top platform with frayed twine. I descended carefully, foot over
foot, the brim of my hard hat slipping over my eyes. In the tunnel it was damp and cold, like a grave. To get
anywhere, you had to walk on your haunches, turning to the side when the passage narrowed. As protection
against cave-ins, Gómez’s workmen had installed several dozen feet of scaffolding—the earth here is
unstable, and earthquakes are common. So far, there had been two partial collapses; no one had been hurt.
Still, it was hard not to feel a shiver of taphophobia.
Through the middle of Teotihuacán studies runs a division like a fault line, separating those who believe that
the city was ruled by an all-powerful and violent king and those who argue that it was governed by a council
of elite families or otherwise bound groups, vying over time for relative influence, arising from the
cosmopolitan nature of the city itself. The first camp, which includes experts like Saburo Sugiyama, has
precedent on its side—the Maya, for instance, are famous for their warlike kings—but unlike Mayan cities,
where rulers had their visages festooned on buildings and where they were buried in opulent tombs,
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Teotihuacán has offered up no such decorations, nor tombs.
Initially, much of the buzz surrounding the tunnel beneath the Temple of the Plumed Serpent centered on the
possibility that Gómez and his colleagues might finally locate one such tomb, and thereby solve one of the
city’s most fundamental enduring mysteries. Gómez himself has entertained the idea. But as we clambered
through the tunnel, he laid out a hypothesis that seemed to stem more directly from the mythological readings
of the city laid out by scholars like Clemency Coggins and Michael Coe.
Fifty feet in, we stopped at a small inlet carved into the wall. Not long before, Gómez and his colleagues had
discovered traces of mercury in the tunnel, which Gómez believed served as symbolic representations of
water, as well as the mineral pyrite, which was embedded in the rock by hand. In semi-darkness, Gómez
explained, the shards of pyrite emit a throbbing, metallic glow. To demonstrate, he unscrewed the nearest
light bulb. The pyrite came to life, like a distant galaxy. It was possible, in that moment, to imagine what the
tunnel’s designers might have felt more than a thousand years ago: 40 feet underground, they’d replicated the
experience of standing amid the stars.
If, Gómez suggested, it was true that the layout of the city proper was meant to stand in for the universe and
its creation, might the tunnel, beneath the temple devoted to an all-encompassing aqueous past, represent a
world outside of time, an underworld or a world before, not the world of the living but of the dead? Up above,
there was the Temple of the Sun and the eternal day. Down below, the stars—not of this earth—and the
deepest night.
I followed Gómez down a short ramp and into the cross-shaped chamber directly under the heart of the
Temple of the Plumed Serpent. Four archaeologists were kneeling in the dirt, brushes and thin-bladed trowels
in hand. A nearby boombox blared Lady Gaga.
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Gómez told me he had not been prepared for the sheer diversity of the objects he encountered in the
farthermost reaches of the tunnel: necklaces, with the string intact. Boxes of beetle wings. Jaguar bones. Balls
of amber. And perhaps most intriguingly, a pair of finely carved black stone statues, each facing the wall
opposite to the entryway of the chamber.
Writing in the late 1990s, Coggins speculated that religious tradition at Teotihuacán would have been
“perpetuated in the linked repetition of ritual,” likely on the part of a priesthood. That ritual, Coggins went on,
“would have concerned the Creation, Teotihuacán’s role in it, and probably also the birth/emergence of the
Teotihuacán people from a cave”—a deep and dark hole in the earth.
Gómez gestured at the area where the twin figures once stood. “You can imagine a scenario where priests
come down here to pay tribute to them,” he explained—to the Creators of the universe, and of the city, one
and the same.
Gómez has one more crucial task to undertake: the excavation of three distinct, buried sub-chambers located
below the resting place of the figurines, the final sections of the tunnel complex as yet unexplored. Some
scholars speculate that the elaborate ritual offerings on display here, and the presence of pyrite and mercury,
which held known associations with the supernatural among ancient Mesoamericans, provide further evidence
that the buried sub-chambers represent the entryway to a particular type of underworld: the place where the
city’s ruler departed the world of the living. Others argue that even the discovery of long-sought human
remains buried in spectacular fashion would hardly close the book on the mystery of Teotihuacán’s rulers:
Whoever is buried here could be just one ruler among many, perhaps even some other kind of holy person.
For Gómez, the sub-chambers, whether they are filled with more ritual relics, or remains, or something
entirely unexpected, might be best understood as a symbolic “tomb”: a final resting place for the city’s
founders, of gods and men.
A few months after leaving Mexico, I checked in with Gómez. He was only marginally closer to uncovering
the chambers beneath the end of the tunnel. His archaeologists were literally often working with toothbrushes,
so as not to damage whatever lay beneath.
Regardless of what he found at the end of the tunnel, once his excavation was complete, he promised me, he’d
be satisfied. “The number of artifacts we’ve uncovered,” he said, pausing. “You could spend a whole career
evaluating the contents.”
Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/discovery-secret-tunnel-mexico-solve-mysteriesteotihuacan-180959070/#Hg9q3FtA4fVlLV8M.99
Give the gift of Smithsonian magazine for only $12! http://bit.ly/1cGUiGv
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http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/discovery-secret-tunnel-mexico-solve-mysteries-teotihuacan180959070/
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Thick-skinned bed bugs beat commonly used bug sprays
April 13, 2016
Source:
University of Sydney
Summary:
The global resurgence in bed bugs over the past two decades could be explained by revelations that
bed bugs have developed a thicker cuticle that enables them to survive exposure to commonly used
insecticides, according to new research.
FULL STORY
Common bed bug (Cimex lectularius) first nymph slide plate (stock image). Understanding why they have
again become so common may help develop new strategies for their control.
Credit: © argot / Fotolia
The global resurgence in bed bugs over the past two decades could be explained by revelations that bed bugs
have developed a thicker cuticle that enables them to survive exposure to commonly used insecticides,
according to University of Sydney research published today in PLOS ONE.
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Bed bugs are blood suckers that produce intense bites and cause significant financial heartache in the
hospitality and tourism sectors. Understanding why they have again become so common may help develop
new strategies for their control.
Resistance to commonly used insecticides is considered the main reason for the global resurgence in bed
bugs, according to University of Sydney PhD candidate, David Lilly, whose research focuses on the
biological mechanisms that help bed bugs survive exposure to commonly used insecticides.
"The new findings reveal that one way bed bugs beat insecticides is by developing a thicker 'skin', said David
Lilly.
"Bed bugs, like all insects, are covered by an exoskeleton called a cuticle. Using scanning electron
microscopy, we were able to compare the thickness of cuticle taken from specimens of bed bugs resistant to
insecticides and from those more easily killed by those same insecticides."
Comparing the cuticle thickness of the bed bugs revealed a stunning difference: the thicker the cuticle, the
more likely the bed bugs were to survive exposure to the insecticides.
The new findings could explain why failures in the control of bed bug infestations are so common. They may
also unlock new pathways to developing more effective insecticides for bed bug control.
"If we understand the biological mechanisms bed bugs use to beat insecticides, we may be able to spot a chink
in their armour that we can exploit with new strategies," said Mr Lilly.
But measuring the thickness of bed bug cuticle wasn't an easy task, he said: "The findings are exciting but
collecting data was frustrating. Taking microscopic measurements of bed bug legs requires a steady hand and
patience, lots of patience."
Story Source:
The above post is reprinted from materials provided by University of Sydney. Note: Materials may be edited
for content and length.
Journal Reference:
1.
David G. Lilly, Sharissa L. Latham, Cameron E. Webb, Stephen L. Doggett. Cuticle Thickening in a
Pyrethroid-Resistant Strain of the Common Bed Bug, Cimex lectularius L. (Hemiptera: Cimicidae).PLOS
ONE, 2016; 11 (4): e0153302 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0153302
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/04/160413151104.htm
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Aldous Huxley on Sincerity, Our Fear of the Obvious, and the Two Types of Truth Artists Must
Reconcile
“All great truths are obvious truths. But not all obvious truths are great truths.”
BY MARIA POPOVA
“The hardest thing is to be sincere,” young André Gide wrote in his journal in 1890, decades before receiving
the Nobel Prize, as he contemplated the central role of sincerity in creative work. But to make sincerity —
that amorphous and intangible manifestation of truth and beauty — the measure of artistic success is an
aspiration at once enormously courageous and increasingly difficult in a culture fixated on such vacant
external metrics as sales and shares.
This paradoxical nature of artistic success is whatAldous Huxley (July, 26 1894–November 22, 1963)
addresses in an essay titled “Sincerity in Art,” found in the altogether magnificent and, lamentably, out-ofprint 1960 volume On Art & Artists (public library).
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Reflecting on an article by a literary agent who contended to have the key to what makes a bestseller, Huxley
winces at how the very question shrinks the creative endeavor:
What are the qualities that cause a book to sell like soap or breakfast food or Ford cars? It is a question the
answer to which we should all like to know. Armed with that precious recipe, we should go to the nearest
stationer’s shop, buy a hundred sheets of paper for sixpence, blacken them with magical scribbles, and sell
them again for six thousand pounds. There is no raw material so richly amenable to treatment as paper. A
pound of iron turned into watch springs is worth several hundreds or even thousands of times its original
value; but a pound of paper turned into popular literature may be sold at a profit of literally millions per cent.
If only we knew the secret of the process by which paper is turned into popular literature!
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Amid all this mysterious transmutation by which the human imagination transforms the cheap raw material
into priceless works of art, Huxley takes particular issue with the literary agent’s assertion that the sole
determinant of the bestseller is that it must be sincere. He digs beneath this unhelpful truism:
All literature, all art, best seller or worst, must be sincere, if it is to be successful… A man cannot successfully
be anything but himself… Only a person with a Best Seller mind can write Best Sellers; and only someone
with a mind like Shelley’s can writePrometheus Unbound. The deliberate forger has little chance with his
contemporaries and none at all with posterity.
But while sincerity in life is a conscious choice — we choose to be sincere or insincere at will — Huxley
argues that sincerity in art is a matter of skill that can’t simply be willed:
Art by Julie Paschkis from Pablo Neruda: Poet of the People by Monica Brown
The truth is that sincerity in art is not an affair of will, of a moral choice between honesty and dishonesty. It is
mainly an affair of talent. A man may desire with all his soul to write a sincere, a genuine book and yet lack
the talent to do it. In spite of his sincere intentions, the book turns out to be unreal, false, and conventional;
the emotions are stagily expressed, the tragedies are pretentious and lying shams and what was meant to be
dramatic is badly melodramatic.
Echoing Agnes Martin’s astute observation that we all have the same inner life but the artist is the one who
recognizes what that is, Huxley adds:
In matters of art “being sincere” is synonymous with “possessing the gifts of psychological understanding and
expression.”
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All human beings feel very much the same emotions; but few know exactly what they feel or can divine the
feelings of others. Psychological insight is a special faculty, like the faculty for understanding mathematics or
music. And of the few who possess that faculty only two or three in every hundred are born with the talent of
expressing their knowledge in artistic form.
Huxley illustrates this point with the most universal experience, love:
Many people — most people, perhaps — have been at one time or another violently in love. But few have
known how to analyze their feelings, and fewer still have been able to express them… They feel, they suffer,
they are inspired by a sincere emotion; but they cannot write. Stilted, conventional, full of stock phrases and
timeworn rhetorical tropes, the average love letter of real life would be condemned, if read in a book, as being
in the last degree “insincere.”
The love letter, Huxley argues, is the ultimate testament to the role of talent in so-called artistic sincerity —
that, after all, is why the love letters of great writers and artists continue to enchant us with perennial insight
into this universal experience. With an eye to Keats’s particularly bewitching love letters, Huxley notes:
We read the love letters of Keats with a passionate interest; they describe in the freshest and most powerful
language the torments of a soul that is conscious of every detail of its agony. Their “sincerity” (the fruit of
their author’s genius) renders them as interesting, as artistically important as Keats’s poems; more important,
even, I sometimes think.
In another essay from the same volume, titled “Art and the Obvious,” Huxley revisits the subject of sincerity
from a different angle — our resistance to it, all the more relevant today, amid a culture that wields cynicism
like a rubber sword against the perceived weakness of sincerity. He writes:
All great truths are obvious truths. But not all obvious truths are great truths.
Huxley defines great truths as universally significant facts that “refer to fundamental characteristics of human
nature” and contrasts them with obvious truths “lacking eternal significance,” like the time it takes to fly from
London to Paris, which “might cease to be true without human nature being in the least changed in any of its
fundamentals.” He considers the role of each in popular art:
Popular art makes use, at the present time, of both classes of obvious truths — of the little obviousnesses as
well as the great. Little obviousnesses fill (at a moderate computation) quite half of the great majority of
contemporary novels, stories, and films. The great public derives an extraordinary pleasure from the mere
recognition of familiar objects and circumstances. It tends to be somewhat disquieted by works of pure
fantasy, whose subject matter is drawn from other worlds than that in which it lives, moves, and has its daily
being. Films must have plenty of real Ford cars and genuine policemen and indubitable trains. Novels must
contain long descriptions of exactly those rooms, those streets, those restaurants and shops and offices with
which the average man and woman are most familiar. Each reader, each member of the audience must be able
to say — with what a solid satisfaction! — “Ah, there’s a real Ford, there’s a policeman, that’s a drawing
room exactly like the Brown’s drawing room.” Recognizableness is an artistic quality which most people find
profoundly thrilling.
But audiences, Huxley argues, are equally voracious for the other, grander class of obviousnesses:
The public at large … also demands the great obvious truths. It demands from the purveyors of art the most
definite statements as to the love of mothers for children, the goodness of honesty as a policy, the uplifting
effects produced by the picturesque beauties of nature on tourists from large cities, the superiority of
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marriages of affection to marriages of interest, the brevity of human existence, the beauty of first love, and so
forth. It requires a constantly repeated assurance of the validity of these great obvious truths.
Art by
Sophie Blackall for The Crows of Pearblossom, Huxley’s only children’s book
The downfall of popular art, Huxley argues, is the inept fusion of these two types of obviousnesses, stripping
the former of its uncomplicated rewards of recognizableness and trivializing the latter by bleeding into the
banal:
The purveyors of popular art do what is asked of them. They state the great, obvious, unchanging truths of
human nature — but state them, alas, in most cases with an emphatic incompetence, which, to the sensitive
reader, makes their affirmations exceedingly distasteful and even painful… The sensitive can only wince and
avert their faces, blushing with a kind of vicarious shame for the whole of humanity.
In a lamentation at once prophetic and rather ironic amid our era of Hallmark cards and lululemon totes and
tea bag fortunes, Huxley adds:
Never in the past have these artistic outrages been so numerous as at present… The spread of education, of
leisure, of economic well-being has created an unprecedented demand for popular art. As the number of good
artists is always strictly limited, it follows that this demand has been in the main supplied by bad artists.
Hence the affirmations of the great obvious truths have been in general incompetent and therefore odious…
The breakup of all the old traditions, the mechanization of work and leisure … have had a bad effect on
popular taste and popular emotional sensibility… Popular art is composed half of the little obvious truths,
stated generally with a careful and painstaking realism, half of the great obvious truths, stated for the most
part (since it is very hard to give them satisfactory expression) with an incompetence which makes them seem
false and repellent.
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With this, Huxley turns to the crux of the tragic denunciation of skilled sincerity that seeded our present era of
cynicism:
Some of the most sensitive and self-conscious artists … have become afraid of all obviousness, the great as
well as the little. At every period … many artists have been afraid — or, perhaps it would be more accurate to
say, have been contemptuous — of the little obvious truths… The excess of popular art has filled them with a
terror of the obvious — even of the obvious sublimities and beauties and marvels. Now, about nine tenths of
life are made up precisely of the obvious. Which means that there are sensitive modern artists who are
compelled, by their disgust and fear, to confine themselves to the exploitation of only a tiny fraction of
existence.
In a sentiment of particular poignancy in the context of modern atrocities like BuzzFeed, Huxley adds:
Nor is it only in regard to the subject matter that the writer’s fear of the obvious manifests itself. He has a
terror of the obvious in his artistic medium — a terror which leads him to make laborious efforts to destroy
the gradually perfected instrument of language… It is extraordinary to what lengths a panic fear can drive its
victims.
He concludes with a word of advice to aspiring artists, all the timelier today:
If young artists really desire to offer proof of their courage they should attack the monster of obviousness and
try to conquer it, try to reduce it to a state of artistic domestication, not timorously run away from it. For the
great obvious truths are there — facts… By pretending that certain things are not there, which in fact arethere,
much of the most accomplished modern art is condemning itself to incompleteness, to sterility, to premature
decrepitude and death.
Huxley’s On Art & Artists is a tremendous read in its entirety, well worth the used-book hunt or a trip to the
local library. Complement it with E.E. Cummings on what it really means to be an artist and Teresita
Fernández on what it really takes to be one, then revisit Huxley on the power of music, drugs, democracy, and
religion, how we become who we are, and his little-known children’s book.
https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/03/28/aldous-huxley-art-artists-sincerityobvious/?mc_cid=eef0166e83&mc_eid=d1c16ac662
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Researchers uncover earliest events following HIV infection, before virus is detectable
Findings could lead to new HIV prevention strategies
April 13, 2016
Source:
Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center
Summary:
New research in monkeys exposed to SIV, the animal equivalent of HIV, reveals what happens in the
very earliest stages of infection, before virus is even detectable in the blood, which is a critical but
difficult period to study in humans. The findings have important implications for vaccine
development and other strategies to prevent infection.
FULL STORY
When researchers exposed rhesus monkeys to SIV and conducted analyses of the animals on days 0, 1, 3, 7
and 10 following exposure, they found that SIV could disseminate rapidly through the body, with viral RNA
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(SIV's genetic material) present in at least one tissue outside the reproductive tract in most monkeys analyzed
24 hours after exposure. (stock image)
Credit: © Ezume Images / Fotolia
New research in monkeys exposed to SIV, the animal equivalent of HIV, reveals what happens in the very
earliest stages of infection, before virus is even detectable in the blood, which is a critical but difficult period
to study in humans. The findings, published online today in the journalCell, have important implications for
vaccine development and other strategies to prevent infection.
"The events during the first few days after exposure to the virus and prior to the initial detection of virus in
the blood are critical in determining the course of infection, but this period is essentially impossible to study
in humans," said lead author Dan Barouch, MD, PhD, Director of the Center for Virology and Vaccine
Research at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) and Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical
School. "Our study is the most comprehensive evaluation of acute HIV/SIV infection to date."
The study was initiated as part of the National Institutes of Health-funded Consortium for AIDS Vaccine
Research and involved multiple collaborating laboratories, including those headed by Rafick-Pierre Sekaly,
PhD, of Case Western Reserve University and Jeffrey Lifson, MD, of the Frederick National Laboratory for
Cancer Research.
When Barouch and his colleagues exposed 44 rhesus monkeys to SIV and conducted analyses of the animals
on days 0, 1, 3, 7 and 10 following exposure, they found that SIV could disseminate rapidly through the body,
with viral RNA (SIV's genetic material) present in at least one tissue outside the reproductive tract in most
monkeys analyzed 24 hours after exposure.
"In addition to rapid viral dissemination, the virus triggered a local inflammatory response that appears to
suppress antiviral innate and adaptive immunity, thus potentially augmenting its own replication," explained
Barouch. "These data provide important insights into the earliest events of infection."
The inflammatory response occurred in virus-infected tissues soon after exposure to SIV, and increasing
amounts of viral RNA correlated with rising amounts of a host protein called NLRX1, which inhibits antiviral
immune responses. In addition, the TGF-beta cell-signaling pathway, which suppresses adaptive immune
responses, was triggered and correlated with lower levels of antiviral T immune cell responses, as well as
higher levels of SIV replication. The researchers observed elevated expression of genes in the TGF-beta
pathway in tissues that contained viral RNA as early as day 1 after exposure to the virus.
The findings suggest that there may be a very narrow window of opportunity to contain or eliminate the virus.
HIV prevention strategies should take these factors into account. "We believe that these insights into early
HIV/SIV infection will be critical for the development of interventions to block infection, such as vaccines,
antibodies, microbicides and drugs," Barouch said. "The next step in this line of research is to evaluate how
various interventions may impact these early events."
Story Source:
The above post is reprinted from materials provided by Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. Note:
Materials may be edited for content and length.
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Journal Reference:
1.
Dan H. Barouch et al. Rapid Inflammasome Activation following Mucosal SIV Infection of Rhesus
Monkeys. Cell, April 2016 DOI:10.1016/j.cell.2016.03.021
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/04/160413140130.htm
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The Disaster of Richard Nixon
Robert G. Kaiser
APRIL 21, 2016 ISSUE
David Burnett/Contact
Press Images
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Richard Nixon at a press conference at the White House, October 1973
Being Nixon: A Man Divided
by Evan Thomas
Random House, 619 pp., $35.00
Fatal Politics: The Nixon Tapes, the Vietnam War, and the Casualties of Reelection
by Ken Hughes
University of Virginia Press, 273 pp., $24.95
Nixon’s Nuclear Specter: The Secret Alert of 1969, Madman Diplomacy, and the Vietnam War
by William Burr and Jeffrey P. Kimball
University Press of Kansas, 455 pp., $39.95
One Man Against the World: The Tragedy of Richard Nixon
by Tim Weiner
Henry Holt, 369 pp., $30.00
1.
In the course of his twenty-eight years in politics and twenty more in active retirement, Richard M. Nixon
uttered a great many dubious propositions. None was less accurate than the words he spoke on November 7,
1962—the day after he lost the governorship of California to Edmund S. Brown, two years after losing the
presidency to John F. Kennedy: “Just think of how much you’re going to be missing,” he told reporters
gathered for what he billed as his last press conference. “You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore.”
A flawed prognostication. The critics who first found fault with Nixon’s 1946 red-baiting campaign against
Democratic congressman Jerry Voorhis of California have been disparaging him ever since. Reading these
books twenty-one years after his death, one realizes that finding fault with Nixon still has a future. It may
never end. Thanks to his gross abuses of presidential power symbolized by the Watergate scandal and to his
own decision to record the details of his presidency on tape, Nixon seems destined to remain an object of
fascination, amazement, scorn, and disgust for as long as historians pay attention to the American presidency.
When the subject matter is their foreign policy, Nixon’s sidekick, Henry A. Kissinger, will be right there
beside him.
Is Nixon’s historical reputation doomed forever? These books suggest that it is. Evan Thomas’s highly
readable Being Nixon is, inadvertently, the most persuasive. Thomas set out to write a sympathetic account of
Nixon’s life. He is persistently empathetic to his subject, but he is also a fine reporter and biographer (of
Robert F. Kennedy, Edward Bennett Williams, John Paul Jones, and others). The good reporter gives his
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readers so many details of Nixon’s bad behavior that Thomas’s intention to write a sympathetic account
collapses under the weight of its own facts. You can feel sorry for Nixon as a human being after reading
Thomas’s book, but it is much harder to excuse his repeated transgressions—of ethical standards, of the law,
of democratic values—and his quite abject reliance on alcohol and drugs. Thomas bends over too far in his
effort to forgive Nixon’s misdeeds, particularly his Vietnam disaster and his ugly racial politics.
The other books in this collection of recent works are openly hostile to Nixon (Tim Weiner and Ken Hughes)
or subtly devastating (William Burr and Jeffrey Kimball). Weiner, a former New York Times reporter and
winner of the Pulitzer Prize, focuses on Vietnam and Watergate; he uses many of the most recently released
tape transcripts and documents to give his version of these familiar stories new energy and salience, but his
well-paced narratives of both stories don’t break much new ground. 1 Hughes, a good researcher but inelegant
writer who has been studying the Nixon tapes since 2000 at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center,
doesn’t hide his personal anger at Nixon and Kissinger for prolonging the Vietnam War when, according to
the evidence of the tapes, they realized it couldn’t be won.
He indicts them for sacrificing tens of thousands of American lives and over a million Asian ones to a lost
cause. But Hughes oversimplifies when he claims that, almost entirely owing to political calculations, the war
had to continue beyond November 1972, or Nixon could not win reelection. Burr and Kimball make more
nuanced use of the same material.
2.
Vietnam was the defining issue of Nixon’s presidency, as he knew it would be. Months before he became
president, Nixon assured H.R. “Bob” Haldeman, his closest aide, that “I’m not going to end up like LBJ, Bob,
holed up in the White House, afraid to show my face on the street. I’m going to stop that war. Fast.” Antiwar
protesters had driven Lyndon Johnson into early retirement, which allowed Nixon to become president. Nixon
played to the country’s war weariness in his 1968 campaign, implying that he had a plan to end the war.
But he had no plan. Ironically, even before he took office Nixon personally sabotaged an opportunity he
might have had to avoid Johnson’s fate. The books under review suggest that this is one of the stories that will
continue to stain Nixon’s reputation.
In late October 1968, when Johnson’s negotiators in Paris finally reached an agreement with North Vietnam
to end American bombing and begin negotiations on a political settlement, Nixon took an enormous personal
risk to derail the peace talks before they could begin. At the time, polls showed that Hubert H. Humphrey,
Nixon’s Democratic opponent and Johnson’s vice-president, was rising fast—so fast that Nixon feared he
might lose the presidency because of the peace deal. So he performed a dirty trick that foreshadowed many
more to come.
For months Nixon had worried about a last-minute deal, or appearance of a deal, that would boost Humphrey.
In July he opened his own channel to Nguyen Van Thieu, the president of South Vietnam. As his
intermediaries to Thieu Nixon chose his campaign manager, the New York attorney John Mitchell, and Anna
Chennault, the exotic, Chinese-born widow of Claire Chennault, a former US Air Force general who led the
Chinese Nationalist air force during World War II. In a secret meeting (Nixon loved secret meetings) in
Mitchell’s New York office with Chennault and Bui Diem, Thieu’s ambassador to the United States, Nixon
explained that when he had a message for Thieu, he would give it to Chennault, who would convey it to the
ambassador to forward to Saigon.
In September the Nixon campaign learned that something big would soon be announced from Paris.
Haldeman wrote a memo to Nixon on September 17, 1968 saying that he learned from a source that Johnson
would likely announce a halt in the bombing campaign in mid-October. In a diary entry of January 13, 1972,
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Haldeman identified this source as Kissinger, recording that “We’ve got to remember he [Kissinger] leaked
things to us in ’68.” Kissinger at the time was a Harvard professor busily cultivating relationships with both
the Humphrey and Nixon camps, apparently hoping for a big job in Washington whoever won the White
House that year. Kissinger had been a consultant to the US delegation, although he wasn’t directly involved in
the negotiations when he visited Paris in September 1968. Richard Holbrooke, a member of the delegation,
said that “Henry was the only person outside the government we were authorized to discuss the negotiations
with.”
AP Images
President Nixon with President Nguyen Van Thieu in South Vietnam, August 1969
On October 31, the day Johnson announced the suspension of bombing of North Vietnam and the imminent
beginning of peace negotiations, Mitchell called Chennault, said he was speaking “on behalf of Mr. Nixon,”
and told her it was “very important that our Vietnamese friends understand our Republican position”—that
Thieu should wait for a better deal from Nixon. The same afternoon the FBI watched Chennault pay a call on
Bui Diem, Thieu’s ambassador.
A National Security Agency listening device in Thieu’s Saigon office heard him tell aides that Nixon wanted
him to wait for the next president to take office. Thieu did refuse to send negotiators, and no peace talks
began. Nixon won the election by a whisker—a popular vote margin of 0.7 percent, though he won in the
electoral college more easily.2
LBJ was livid; he thought Nixon had violated the Logan Act, which makes it illegal for private citizens to
interfere with official diplomacy. Aides talked Johnson out of making public what he knew about Nixon’s
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secret maneuverings, much of it based on wiretaps. LBJ believed that Nixon subverted any chance for peace
before he left office.
There is no persuasive evidence that peace talks would have succeeded; but Nixon’s presidency began with a
newly incurred political debt to Thieu, and with no prospect of an early exit from the war, which Nixon said
privately was unwinnable. “There’s no way to win the war,” he told his own speechwriters months earlier.
“But we can’t say that, of course. In fact, we have to seem to say the opposite, just to keep some degree of
bargaining leverage.”
.
Richard Nixon: “I’m probably the toughest guy that’s been in this office since—probably since Theodore
Roosevelt.”
Henry Kissinger: “No question.”
—White House conversation, June 30, 1971
The most revealing of the newest books is Nixon’s Nuclear Specter by William Burr and Jeffrey P. Kimball.
It is better than its awkward title and subtitle. Burr and Kimball neatly recreate the Vietnam dilemma that
Nixon and Kissinger confronted: they couldn’t win, but they couldn’t face losing. Nixon’s Nuclear Specter is
a detailed and careful account of Nixon’s and Kissinger’s fruitless efforts during 1969 to find an “honorable”
way out of Vietnam. As events that year unfolded, these authors demonstrate, honor had little to do with it.
Nixon’s one big idea for resolving the dilemma was to scare his Communist adversaries into making an
acceptable deal to end the war. This is how he explained it to Haldeman, as reported by Haldeman in his
book The Ends of Power (1978) and cited by Burr and Kimball:
They’ll believe any threat of force that Nixon makes because it’s Nixon…. I call it the Madman Theory, Bob.
I want the North Vietnamese to believe I’ve reached the point where I might do anything to stop the war.
We’ll just slip the word to them that, “for God’s sake, you know Nixon is obsessed about communism. We
can’t constrain him when he’s angry—and he has his hand on the nuclear button”…and Ho Chi Minh himself
will be in Paris in two days begging for peace.
Nixon and Kissinger mobilized an extraordinary combination of unpublicized threats and unannounced acts of
violence to pursue this chimera. The bluntest was the bombing of Vietcong and North Vietnamese base areas
in Cambodia, near the border with South Vietnam, a huge military campaign in March 1969 that, amazingly,
remained a secret for many months. Nixon tried to send “Madman” signals, particularly to Moscow but also
to Hanoi and Peking, as it then was called, by multiple means. One was a personal letter to Ho Chi Minh to be
delivered by Jean Sainteny, a Frenchman who had personal ties to Vietnam’s leaders. Nixon asked Sainteny
to act as his envoy.
The letter that Sainteny delivered to a North Vietnamese official in Paris was a respectful plea to accelerate
negotiations and “bring the blessings of peace to the brave people of Vietnam….” But Sainteny was instructed
to accompany Nixon’s letter with a threatening verbal message setting a deadline of November 1 for reaching
an agreement—the first anniversary of Johnson’s bombing halt. If “no valid solution has been reached” by
then, Sainteny was to warn, “he [Nixon] will regretfully find himself obliged to have recourse to measures of
great consequence and force.” Kissinger repeated similar language in a secret meeting in Paris with the North
Vietnamese. All this had no visible effect on Hanoi’s behavior.
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Nixon and Kissinger could not get a helpful reaction from the Russians or the Chinese, either. 3 In the spring
of 1969, Kissinger had tried using the threat to impress Anatoly Dobrynin, the Soviet ambassador in
Washington, to no effect.
Nixon and Kissinger both had high hopes for diplomacy with the two great Communist powers, the Soviet
Union and China. Nixon’s boldest, most creative idea was to finally recognize “Red China,” “pulling it back
into the world community,” as he wrote in 1967, and also as a way to exploit the Sino–Soviet split, put
pressure on the Soviets, and restore America’s global primacy. Both men thought there was a good
opportunity to negotiate meaningful limits on the nuclear arms race with Moscow. But a principal goal of
their diplomacy was also to find a way out of Vietnam, and they hoped to scare or persuade the Communist
powers to help by pressuring North Vietnam to make a deal. They never got such help.
The secret bombing of Cambodia, launched in March 1969—advocated by Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman
General Earle Wheeler, endorsed by Kissinger, and embraced by Nixon—was their first attempt to impress
the North Vietnamese with their seriousness of purpose. Over the subsequent four years American bombers
dropped nearly 2.8 million tons of ordnance on Cambodian territory, a huge quantity, but North Vietnam
never acknowledged that it knew this bombardment was occurring.
Kissinger, according to Burr and Kimball, favored a further escalation of the war with an aggressive bombing
campaign against the North in 1969. Nixon authorized planning for such a campaign. Kissinger’s staff and
Pentagon officials conceived Operation Duck Hook to be executed in October, shortly before Nixon’s
November 1 deadline. In addition, the navy conducted exercises off the coast of North Vietnam that Nixon
hoped Hanoi would interpret as practice for the mining of Haiphong harbor.
Quite amazingly, Nixon and Kissinger, according to documents cited by Burr and Kimball, also ordered an
unannounced, worldwide nuclear alert: an elaborate military exercise that put US strategic forces—missiles,
missile-carrying submarines, and bombers—in a position of high readiness, as though the US was preparing
to launch a nuclear attack.
These details were particularly fascinating for me because, as a young correspondent in Vietnam for most of
1969 and 1970, I knew nothing about any of this secret maneuvering. In early March 1969, I had stopped in
Paris on my way to Saigon to meet with American officials who participated in the peace talks, Holbrooke
among them. They told me how lucky I was to be getting to Vietnam just in time to witness the war’s last act.
My first months in Vietnam were dominated by “Vietnamization,” a plan conceived by Melvin Laird, Nixon’s
politically astute secretary of defense. Laird’s priority was bringing American troops home. Vietnamization
meant turning the fighting over to the South Vietnamese army and hoping for the best as Americans
withdrew. By early 1970 an American force that peaked at about 540,000 had shrunk by 115,000, with more
reductions promised. Bringing troops home was popular in the US, probably reducing the public pressure on
Nixon to end the war.
Initially Vietnamization went smoothly. Communist forces inside South Vietnam, severely depleted by losses
suffered in the Tet Offensive of January–February 1968, and another offensive in May, could not immediately
exploit American withdrawals. In 1969, the South Vietnamese held their own in a quieter war. A weaker
enemy also enabled the American-sponsored pacification program to bring a growing portion of the
population under government control, especially in the populous Mekong Delta, where Vietcong—the local
Communists—nearly disappeared in late 1969.
The earnest Americans tasked with pacification allowed themselves to become hopeful. I wrote a series of
articles about them for The Washington Post that fall called “The New Optimists.” I described their
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hopefulness, but noted that none of them spoke of winning the war. The smartest American advisers realized
that pacification could not create victory; winning would eventually require defeating an effective North
Vietnamese army that had thousands of men inside South Vietnam, and tens of thousands more on its
periphery in Cambodia and Laos. These were the troops that ultimately won the war.
The account of Burr and Kimball startled me by suggesting how little attention Nixon and Kissinger paid to
pacification or Vietnamization. The war I was covering was largely separate from the war they were waging.
Pacification and Vietnamization were delaying tactics; they knew they needed a deal with Hanoi—what they
called “a political solution”—to end the war. Hence the secret bombing and threats. The trouble was, they had
no apparent impact in Moscow, Peking, or Hanoi. As Nixon’s Nuclear Specter makes clear, by the end of
1969 the masters of American foreign policy had not managed to convince the targets of their strategy to
make the deal they sought.
Their decision to withdraw American troops spoke louder than Nixon’s vague threat of “measures of great
consequence and force.” We have no reliable account of North Vietnamese deliberations, but the growing
antiwar movement in the United States seems to have impressed Hanoi more than the mining exercise in the
Gulf of Tonkin. In a memo to Nixon on September 10, Kissinger acknowledged that antiwar protests and
troop withdrawals encouraged Hanoi “to wait us out,” and admitted the weakness of Thieu and the South
Vietnamese army. Kissinger initially wanted Duck Hook to go forward to “jar” the North Vietnamese into
negotiating a deal.
But by October Nixon had lost his stomach for escalation. His secretaries of state and defense, William
Rogers and Laird, might resign in protest, he feared, and the huge antiwar protests that fall seem to have
scared him. Nixon called off Duck Hook.4
The nuclear alert did go forward, beginning on October 13. Apparently, according to Burr and Kimball, the
Russians barely noticed. They describe Nixon’s and especially Kissinger’s excitement when Dobrynin called
on October 17 to request a meeting with Nixon. Kissinger told Laird that Dobrynin’s call suggested that the
alert “seems to be working.” Haldeman recorded in his diary: “K thinks this is good chance of being the big
break, but that it will come in stages. P [Nixon] is more skeptical.”
The excitement soon faded. When Dobrynin came to the White House, the alert was not mentioned. “The
toughest guy [in the Oval Office] since TR” had prepared for a showdown with Dobrynin. Kissinger had
advised him that the purpose of the meeting “will be to keep the Soviets concerned about what we might do
around 1 November.” But Nixon, according to Burr and Kimball, “failed to frighten or intimidate the veteran
statesman Dobrynin.” He rambled; he lost his temper; he complained that both North Vietnam and the Soviet
Politburo were trying to “break” him; he was, by Dobrynin’s account, nervous and sometimes agitated.
Nixon did remember at one point to warn that “the United States would have to pursue its own methods for
bringing the war to an end” if talks failed. But he ended by saying that if Hanoi continued to restrain its forces
in the South, the US would reciprocate by taking no new offensive action—hardly a threat. Later that night,
he instructed Kissinger to call Dobrynin back to the White House and scare him. Kissinger ignored the order.
Reporting this conversation to Moscow,5 Dobrynin observed that Nixon lacked emotional self-control. “The
main thing now for him…is to end the war in Vietnam, everything else is secondary,” Dobrynin concluded.
“The fate of his predecessor Lyndon Johnson is beginning to really worry him. Apparently, this is taking on
such an emotional coloration that Nixon is unable to control himself even in a conversation with a foreign
ambassador.”
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4.
The utter failure of the threats of 1969 to persuade Hanoi to compromise left Nixon and Kissinger with few
cards to play. Their fallback position was one that Kissinger had discussed in academic settings as early as
1967, and that he and Nixon realized from the beginning might have to be their policy. This was the so-called
decent interval solution—making a deal with Hanoi providing for complete American withdrawal (and return
of all US POWs). In return, the North Vietnamese and Vietcong would agree not to try to conquer South
Vietnam for a brief period—“say eighteen months or some period,” Kissinger told Zhou En-lai in an afterdinner conversation on his first secret visit to Peking in July 1971 (which did not appear in Kissinger’s
subsequent published account of the meeting).
Kissinger had offered this solution to Dobrynin four months after Nixon took office, on May 14, 1969.
Dobrynin’s report on this meeting suggests that Kissinger’s message surprised him. “Nixon is even prepared
to accept any political system in South Vietnam, ‘provided [here Dobrynin is quoting Kissinger] there is a
fairly reasonable interval between conclusion of an agreement and such a system’” coming into being. From
this evidence, both the Soviets and the Chinese knew that Nixon was ready to betray Thieu if he got a facesaving peace agreement.
The two men running US policy neither told members of Congress nor informed the American public that this
was their position; nor did they tell President Thieu about it. Perhaps these choices were also sensible, given
the absence of practical alternatives, but choosing them and then omitting later comment on them—as both
did in books they published years later6—will leave them vulnerable when future generations of historians
address these events.
As a practical matter, the problem with the decent interval strategy was the implicit requirement that North
Vietnam agree to it. Though Nixon did launch unilateral withdrawals with Vietnamization, he rejected
walking away from South Vietnam—what he called the “bug out” option. He wanted Hanoi to collaborate on
the decent interval to give him political cover and allow him to claim that he found the long-promised
“honorable” end to the war. Not surprisingly given both their history and Nixon’s, the North Vietnamese said
openly that they did not trust or believe him. The result was more war.
Toward the end of 1970, his frustrations again mounting, Nixon considered simply announcing the total
withdrawal of American troops by the end of the following year. On December 15, 1970, Haldeman recorded
a memorable conversation with Kissinger:
He [Kissinger] thinks that any pullout next year would be a serious mistake, because the adverse reaction to it
could set in well before the ’72 elections. He favors instead a continued winding-down and then a pullout
right at the fall of ’72 so that if any bad results follow, they’ll be too late to affect the election. 7
Kissinger, the diplomatic expert, had here become a political adviser giving guidance to Nixon on his
reelection campaign. Whether because of Kissinger’s advice or his own calculations, Nixon did not pursue the
idea of getting out in 1971.
Prolonging the war was an expensive choice. More than 21,000 Americans died in Vietnam after Nixon
became president, more than a third of our total losses in the war. Tens of thousands more were wounded. But
Americans suffered the least; hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese lives were lost after 1969. The bombing
of Cambodia, and then Nixon’s 1970 invasion in search of a target that never really existed, the “Central
Office for South Vietnam,” COSVN, which US intelligence thought was a field headquarters for the
Vietcong, contributed to the destabilization of Cambodia.
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The March 1970 coup that ousted Prince Norodom Sihanouk, the skillful Cambodian leader who had
preserved his country’s independence and neutrality in a dangerous neighborhood, brought on more
instability, encouraged by Nixon and Kissinger’s policy of supporting the creation a large new Cambodian
army under the coup’s leader, Lon Nol. That army never proved effective, and Lon Nol’s bumbling
government could not cope with the chaos created by the widening war inside Cambodia that Nixon
promoted. The Khmer Rouge rebels who started out as a small band opposing Sihanouk exploited that chaos.
By 1975 they took over the country, and eventually killed some two million Cambodians. 8
The bombing of Cambodia was part of a failed effort to avoid what ultimately could not be avoided: the
reunification of Vietnam. For more than four years Nixon and Kissinger looked desperately for a way to
salvage the American commitment in South Vietnam and minimize the repercussions of losing the war. But
they did so cynically, clumsily, and ultimately forlornly. Robert Dallek captured the essence of their Vietnam
policy in two words: “a disaster.”
The disaster extended to Nixon’s presidency. In Haldeman’s memorable statement, “Without the Vietnam
war, there would have been no Watergate.” Haldeman used the term not to describe just the break-in at the
Democratic National Committee, but more broadly to cover all the craziness that John Mitchell memorably
called “the White House horrors.” Haldeman realized how the war poisoned Nixon’s presidency.
As Carl Bernstein wrote in a review of the books by Thomas and Wiener, “Vietnam and Watergate are
inextricably linked in the Nixon presidency. They are an intertwined tale—one story—of sordid abuse of
presidential power, vengeance, cynicism and lawlessness.”9 The connection between Vietnam and Watergate
is often missed. Thomas ignores it; Weiner doesn’t, but he makes too little of it.
Deceit and disregard for the law were the common threads. The abuses that constituted Watergate began with
events tied to the Vietnam war: first was the attempt to sabotage LBJ’s peace talks in October 1968. In 1969
came the secret bombing of Cambodia and the wiretapping of reporters and White House aides, provoked by
a leak to The New York Times about the secret bombing. Then the break-in at the office of the psychiatrist of
Daniel Ellsberg, the man who leaked the Pentagon Papers about the war.
The Huston Plan, drawn up by a White House aide in 1970 and approved by Nixon, proposed break-ins and
black-bag jobs aimed at radicals, especially anti-Vietnam activists. The plan was rescinded, but many were
kept under surveillance. Nixon explicitly ratified the use of illegal break-ins when he ordered aides to “blow
the safe” at the Brookings Institution in Washington in search of Vietnam secrets from the Kennedy and
Johnson administrations. That order was also never carried out, but soon after Nixon issued it, Mitchell and
others came up with the idea of breaking into the Democratic committee offices. Ultimately, deceit and
lawlessness forced Nixon from office, and sent twenty-two of his colleagues to jail.10
We have learned more about the Nixon presidency than about any other, but, astoundingly, there is much
more to come. Nearly 2,700 hours of Nixon tapes have been released, but 774 hours more are still being
withheld for various reasons. So are hundreds of thousands, perhaps more than a million pages of White
House documents. Some of this material is still classified; some involves personal records of the Nixon
family; some is being withheld without explanation. Eventually everything will come out, assuring that Nixon
will live on as the subject of new books with new revelations. None of this seems likely to be exculpatory.
1.
1
The best book on the Nixon presidency, I think, is Richard Reeves’s President Nixon: Alone in the White
House (Simon and Schuster, 2001). It was published days before the September 11 attacks and never got
the attention it deserves. Another excellent book on these subjects is Robert Dallek’s Nixon and Kissinger:
Partners in Power (HarperCollins, 2007). Elizabeth Drew, who writes often in these pages, has written two
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books on Nixon, Washington Journal: The Events of 1973–1974 (Random House, 1975) and Richard M.
Nixon (Times Books, 2007) ↩
2.
2
This story is best told in Ken Hughes’s Chasing Shadows (University of Virginia Press, 2014). Thomas and
Weiner provide brief accounts in their books. Whether Thieu’s boycott determined the outcome of the
1968 election is far from clear, but Nixon worried that it might have, and that his involvement might be
revealed. ↩
3.
3
Nixon’s bold opening to China—certainly his biggest accomplishment as president—was in part a
complicated effort to use the Sino–Soviet split to help him persuade Hanoi to end the war on satisfactory
terms. This failed, too. Nixon’s China policy changed the course of history, but not of the Vietnam War. ↩
4.
4
The proposal for a large-scale air campaign against North Vietnam, including mining of the principal port
of Haiphong, was revived in 1972, when Nixon and Kissinger tried to compel Hanoi to complete the peace
agreement Kissinger had negotiated. ↩
5.
5
Dobrynin’s cables to Moscow reporting on his meetings with Nixon and Kissinger were published jointly
by the State Department and the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 2007—a valuable source for
researchers that Burr and Kimball exploit effectively. ↩
6.
6
Nixon avoids the question entirely in his long memoir RN (Grosset and Dunlap, 1978). In a later book, No
More Vietnams(Arbor House, 1985), he described the decent interval option that others had proposed: “I
believed that this was the most immoral option of all. As president, I could not ask any young American to
risk his life for an unjust or unwinnable cause.” But that’s just what he did. Kissinger in his White House
Years (Little, Brown, 1979) wrote that it was incorrect to suggest they sought only “a ‘decent interval’
before a final collapse of Saigon.” He did not quote from the meetings with Zhou and Soviet officials
where he described Nixon’s objective of having an interval—described as a “reasonable interval,”
according to Dobroynin. ↩
7.
7
Hughes and his colleagues at the University of Virginia have created a website where many of the tapes of
the Nixon presidency can be heard. You can hear Haldeman dictating this diary entry
here:prde.upress.virginia.edu/conversations/4006726. ↩
8.
8
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In Sideshow, published in 1979, William Shawcross argued that the US bombing had led to the rise of the
Khmer Rouge. In a recent letter to the editor of The New York Review, Shawcross wrote that the history of
the Khmer Rouge conquest was more complex:
But Sihanouk (with whom I later became friendly) also made huge mistakes. The most appalling, which he
had told me he always regretted, was siding with China and the Khmer Rouge immediately after his
overthrow in 1970. That did far more to guarantee the destruction of the country than the secret bombing.
↩
9.
9
See “Watergate Reporter: Nixon Is Still Tricky After All These Years,” The Washington Post, July 24,
2015. ↩
10. 10
For a lively and revealing recent account of Watergate, see John Dean’s The Nixon Defense (Viking,
2014). ↩
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/04/21/disaster-of-richard-nixon/
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Device allows paralyzed man to swipe credit card, perform other movements
Computer chip in brain works with software, gives man functional control of his hand
April 13, 2016
Source:
Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center
Summary:
New research is enabling a quadriplegic Ohio man to regain his ability to pick up objects, stir liquids
and even play video games -- using his own thoughts.
FULL STORY
Swiping a credit card was something Ian Burkhart, 24, never thought he would do again. Burkhart was
paralyzed from the shoulders down after a diving accident in 2010, but regained functional use of his hand
through the use of neural bypass technology.
Credit: The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center
COLUMBUS, Ohio - Six years ago, he was paralyzed in a diving accident. Today, he participates in clinical
sessions during which he can grasp and swipe a credit card or play a guitar video game with his own fingers
and hand. These complex functional movements are driven by his own thoughts and a prototype medical
system that are detailed in a study published online today in the journal Nature.
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The device, called NeuroLife, was invented at Battelle, which teamed with physicians and neuroscientists
from The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center to develop the research approach and perform the
clinical study. Ohio State doctors identified the study participant and implanted a tiny computer chip into his
brain.
That pioneering participant, Ian Burkhart, is a 24-year-old quadriplegic from Dublin, Ohio, and the first
person to use this technology. This electronic neural bypass for spinal cord injuries reconnects the brain
directly to muscles, allowing voluntary and functional control of a paralyzed limb by using his thoughts. The
device interprets thoughts and brain signals then bypasses his injured spinal cord and connects directly to a
sleeve that stimulates the muscles that control his arm and hand.
"We're showing for the first time that a quadriplegic patient is able to improve his level of motor function and
hand movements," said Dr. Ali Rezai, a co-author of the study and a neurosurgeon at Ohio State's Wexner
Medical Center.
Burkhart first demonstrated the neural bypass technology in June 2014, when he was able to open and close
his hand simply by thinking about it. Now, he can perform more sophisticated movements with his hands and
fingers such as picking up a spoon or picking up and holding a phone to his ear -- things he couldn't do before
and which can significantly improve his quality of life.
"It's amazing to see what he's accomplished," said Nick Annetta, electrical engineering lead for Battelle's
team on the project. "Ian can grasp a bottle, pour the contents of the bottle into a jar and put the bottle back
down. Then he takes a stir bar, grips that and then stirs the contents of the jar that he just poured and puts it
back down. He's controlling it every step of the way."
The neural bypass technology combines algorithms that learn and decode the user's brain activity and a highdefinition muscle stimulation sleeve that translates neural impulses from the brain and transmits new signals
to the paralyzed limb.
The Battelle team has been working on this technology for more than a decade. To develop the algorithms,
software and stimulation sleeve, Battelle scientists first recorded neural impulses from an electrode array
implanted in a paralyzed person's brain. They used that recorded data to illustrate the device's effect on the
patient and prove the concept.
Four years ago, former Battelle researcher Chad Bouton and his team began collaborating with Ohio State
Neurological Institute researchers and clinicians Rezai and Dr. Jerry Mysiw to design the clinical trials and
validate the feasibility of using the neural bypass technology in patients.
"In the 30 years I've been in this field, this is the first time we've been able to offer realistic hope to people
who have very challenging lives," said Mysiw, chair of the Department of Physical Medicine and
Rehabilitation at Ohio State. "What we're looking to do is help these people regain more control over their
bodies."
During a three-hour surgery in April 2014, Rezai implanted a computer chip smaller than a pea onto the motor
cortex of Burkhart's brain.
The Ohio State and Battelle teams worked together to figure out the correct sequence of electrodes to
stimulate to allow Burkhart to move his fingers and hand functionally. For example, Burkhart uses different
brain signals and muscles to rotate his hand, make a fist or pinch his fingers together to grasp an object. As
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part of the study, Burkhart worked for months using the electrode sleeve to stimulate his forearm to rebuild
his atrophied muscles so they would be more responsive to the electric stimulation.
"During the last decade, we've learned how to decipher brain signals in patients who are completely paralyzed
and now, for the first time, those thoughts are being turned into movement," said study co-author Bouton,
who directed Battelle's team before he joined the New York-based Feinstein Institute for Medical Research.
"Our findings show that signals recorded from within the brain can be re-routed around an injury to the spinal
cord, allowing restoration of functional movement and even movement of individual fingers."
Burkhart said it was an easy decision to participate in the FDA-approved clinical trial at Ohio State's Wexner
Medical Center because he wanted to try to help others with spinal cord injuries. "I just kind of think that it's
my obligation to society," Burkhart said. "If someone else had an opportunity to do it in some other part of the
world, I would hope that they would commit their time so that everyone can benefit from it in the future."
Rezai and the team from Battelle agree that this technology holds the promise to help patients affected by
various brain and spinal cord injuries such as strokes and traumatic brain injury to be more independent and
functional.
"We're hoping that this technology will evolve into a wireless system connecting brain signals and thoughts to
the outside world to improve the function and quality of life for those with disabilities," Rezai said. "One of
our major goals is to make this readily available to be used by patients at home."
Burkhart is the first of a potential five participants in a clinical study. Mysiw and Rezai have identified a
second patient who is scheduled to start the study in the summer.
"Participating in this research has changed me in the sense that I have a lot more hope for the future now,"
Burkhart said. "I always did have a certain level of hope, but now I know, first-hand, that there are going to be
improvements in science and technology that will make my life better."
###
Other authors of this study are Ammar Shaikhouni, Marcia A. Bockbrader, Dylan M. Nielson, Per B.
Sederberg and Milind Deogaonkar from Ohio State and David A. Friedenberg, Gaurav Sharma, Bradley C.
Glenn and Austin G. Morgan from Battelle.
Story Source:
The above post is reprinted from materials provided by Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center. Note:
Materials may be edited for content and length.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/04/160413140118.htm
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How to Build Urban Tech Centers Without Encouraging Inequality
Train the local community to work in the industry, for one thing.

FEARGUS O'SULLIVAN

@FeargusOSull
Hoxton Square, at the heart of East London's tech district. (Flickr/Eric Wahlforss)
Are so-called “tech ghettos” an inevitable product of any city-based boom in the tech sector? That’s a
question explored by a new report from Britain’s Royal Town Planning Institute.
Too often, the report notes, cities experience major growth in tech industries without noticeable positive
effects for the wider communities in which these businesses are located. The result is a two-speed economy
plagued by economic segregation and even displacement for longer-term residents who can neither afford
local rents nor access the new jobs created by the boom.
This isn’t to suggest that the tech sector is not economically vital. According to the report, the Internet
economy will account for 12.4 percent of Britain’s GDP in 2016. It’s more that tech businesses seem to be
less successful than those in other sectors in sending out positive economic ripples across society as a whole.
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The issue is how to mediate more effectively between tech companies, communities, and governments to
create a better spread of benefits for everyone. RTPI’s report does not present itself as a blueprint for
eradicating all negative change, but it does show some routes through which tech company influence can be
broadened and softened. Here are four of its key recommendations.
1. Train the local community
Too often, tech companies can seem like impregnable fortresses to inner-city communities. While they gobble
up office space and push up rents, they also tend to import their workers from elsewhere. Lower-income
communities often can’t access the training that would help them unlock the potential opportunities on their
doorsteps, and are thus left with just a scanty crumb trail of entry-level service jobs. Established local
businesses, meanwhile, can find themselves priced out by a boom many of whose innovative developments
have too often passed them by, and thus failed to deliver significant benefits.
The industrial city of Cwmbran, in South Wales, offers an example. Faced with a steadily dilapidating stock
of factory buildings, the region’s planners offered to refund private companies who rehabilitated these
buildings if they used the refund to invest in research and development or advanced manufacturing facilities.
U.S.-based automobile component manufacturer Meritor accepted this offer, plowing a refund of £7.5 million
($10.9 million) from decontaminating its factory site into creating a world center of excellence for vehicle
braking systems. The scheme enabled Meritor and Cwmbran to safeguard 1,170 jobs, most of them skilled.
If cities improve tech training, and use local connections to tie this training to apprenticeships with companies
that have relocated to the area, then a local community’s share in a tech boom can be greatly increased.
Likewise, local leaders can encourage tech companies to pool expertise with local businesses.
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Some U.K. cities are already experimenting with these approaches. In the London Borough of Hackney, a
historically low-income area that’s home to the city’s Silicon Roundabout, community college traineeships
have been linked up with apprenticeships in local tech companies. The city of Leeds has paired up with
Google to create the Digital Garage, a pop-up located in the regenerated Leeds Canal Dock, where local
businesses can go for advice and master classes.
2. Encourage meaningful regeneration
The regenerative effect of tech companies depends greatly on where they invest. There may be only a limited
positive ripple effect for the wider community to be gained from a few extra digital creatives setting up shop
in an old downtown warehouse. But in other locations, tech companies can still have a massive positive
effect—and they’re more likely to head for these places if government incentives encourage them to look
beyond the most obvious work sites.
3. Deliver public services
A tech boom can provide a community with a potential pot of invaluable resources on its doorstep. While tech
companies’ presence may play a role in boosting income inequality in some places, using the sort of
innovations in which they specialize can also reduce the tax burden for residents.
An example of this is the use of GPS mapping for waste collection, which several U.K. cities have employed
to streamline routes and street-cleaning services, resulting in substantial savings. Such gains are small, but
played out across all local government they could make a significant difference to city budgets.
4. Create better infrastructure
Granted, a city doesn’t need to host a tech hub to be able to develop better technological solutions to its
problems. It’s nonetheless far easier for planners to start an in-depth conversation with the tech sector when
there is a local presence, meaning that solutions can be thrashed out over a period of years if necessary.
Barcelona offers a classic example of this process. In 2010, the city began a lengthy dialogue with local
company Bitcarrier on possible ways to improve urban mobility. The result, in 2013, was the installation of
19 sensors across the city that are able to provide citizens via an app with up-to-date traffic and transit
information.
http://www.citylab.com/cityfixer/2016/02/tech-ghetto-startup-royal-town-planning-institutereport/462942/?utm_source=nl__link1_021616
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Did California Figure Out How to Fix Global Warming?
—Gabriel Kahn | March/April 2016 issue
Ivanpah Solar under construction, near the Mojave Desert and the border of Nevada. See more of Jamey
Stillings' stunning photographs here.
JENNIFER GILL got pregnant with her first child when she was in eighth grade. She didn't finish high
school, but she got her GED during a stint in prison for forgery. For most of her working life she was a
waitress in and around the town of Oildale, a suburb of Bakersfield in the southern tip of California's Central
Valley. "We come from backgrounds where minimum wage is the best we can hope for," she says. Then, four
years ago, Gill happened to see a television commercial for a solar-panel installation course at a local
community college.
Within a few weeks, the 46-year-old was out in the field, helping install photovoltaic panels for the
engineering behemoth Bechtel and making more than $14 an hour. She quickly got another job installing
panels for another solar farm, this time for over $15 an hour. Now she's in an apprenticeship program with the
International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, and for the first time in her life she has retirement benefits.
At her urging, her younger sister, who had lost her job at a local Dollar Tree, signed up to become a solarpanel installer. Other friends followed suit. "Some of these folks have bought houses now," Gill says.
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This past fall, Gill was working at Springbok 1, a solar field on about 700 acres of
abandoned Kern County farmland. In a neighboring field, workers recently broke
ground on Springbok 2. A few months earlier, 35 miles south on the flat, highdesert scrubland of the Antelope Valley, workers locked into place the last of 1.7
million panels for the Solar Star Projects, owned by Warren Buffett's Berkshire
Hathaway. The panels are arrayed in neat rows across 3,200 acres, an area nearly
four times the size of New York's Central Park. In June, Solar Star began sending
579 megawatts of electricity—making it the most powerful solar farm in the
world—across Southern California, where it powers the equivalent of more than a
quarter of a million homes.
For over a century, Kern County made much of its money from gushing oil fields.
The town of Taft still crowns an oil queen for its anniversary parade. But with the
oil economy down, unemployment stands at 9.2 percent—far above the national
average. Local politics remain deeply conservative. Merle Haggard, who was
from Oildale, wrote his all-time biggest hit, "Okie From Muskogee," about the
place ("We don't burn no draft cards down on Main Street"). Today, the region is
represented in Congress by Republican Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, a
cheerleader for the oil industry.
Nature, however, sculpted this landscape for solar and wind. The sun bears down
almost every day, and as the valley floor heats up, it pulls air across the Tehachapi
Mountains, driving the blades on towering wind turbines. For nearly eight years,
money for renewable energy has been pouring in. About seven miles north of
Solar Star, where sand-colored hills rise out of the desert, Spanish energy giant
Iberdrola has built 126 wind turbines. French power company EDF has 330
turbines nestled in the same hills. Farther north, the Alta Wind Energy Center has
an estimated 600 turbines. Together, these and other companies have spent more
than $28 billion on land, equipment, and the thousands of workers needed to
construct renewable-energy plants in Kern County. This new economy has created
more than 1,300 permanent jobs in the region. It has also created a bonanza of
more than $50 million in additional property taxes a year—about 11 percent of
Kern County's total tax haul. Lorelei Oviatt, the director of planning and
community development, says, "This is money we never expected."
For many decades, power players—Republicans and Democrats—have been
marching toward a carbon-neutral existence.
But the sun and wind were not the most important forces in the transformation of
the region's economy. The biggest factor was the state government in Sacramento,
where for many decades power players—Republicans and Democrats—have been
marching toward a carbon-neutral existence.
Today, California can claim first place in just about every renewable-energy
category: It is home to the nation's largest wind farm and the world's largest solar
thermal plant. It has the largest operating photovoltaic solar installation on Earth
and more rooftop solar than any other state. (It helps to have a lot of roofs.) This
new industry has been an economic boon as well. Solar companies now employ
an estimated 64,000 people in the state, surpassing the number of people working
for all the major utilities. California has attracted more venture capital investment
for clean-energy technologies than the European Union and China combined.
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Even the state's manufacturing base is experiencing a boost; one of California's largest factories is Tesla
Motors' sprawling electric-vehicle assembly plant in the Bay Area.
Reagan: Bettman/Corbis/AP; Brown: Keystone/Zuma Press; Davis: Brian Baer/Zuma Press; Schwarzenegger:
Brian Lowe/Zuma Press
All of these advances have undercut a fundamental tenet of economics: that more growth equals more
emissions. Between 2003 and 2013 (the most recent data), the Golden State decreased its greenhouse gas
emissions by 5.5 percent while increasing its gross domestic product by 17 percent—and it did so under the
thumb of the nation's most stringent energy regulations.
That achievement has made California the envy of other governments. At the climate change summit in
Paris last December, Governor Jerry Brown floated about like an A-list celebrity. Reporters trailed after him,
foreign delegations sought his advice, audiences applauded wherever he spoke. And Brown, reveling in the
attention, readily offered up California as a blueprint for the world.
WHEN HIS TERM ENDS in two years, Brown will have been in elective office in California for 34 years,
including 16 as governor, a job he first took on in 1975 and reclaimed in 2011. At 77, Brown, whose long
résumé includes a stint at seminary, is the rare American politician who muses openly about whether
humanity has already "gone over the edge," calls climate change deniers "troglodytes," and blames global
warming for every natural calamity that befalls California, from drought to wildfires, even when he's
criticized for taking the connection too far.
In what is likely to be the last chapter of his elective career, Brown is now embarking on a bold social
experiment that will define his legacy. This past October, he reset California's goalposts by adopting some of
the most ambitious carbon-reducing rules in the world. SB 350, the Clean Energy and Pollution Reduction
Act, says that by 2030, California must get half its electricity from renewables and it must double the energy
efficiency of its buildings. These measures are intended to push the state to its ultimate goal: by 2050, cutting
greenhouse gas emissions to 80 percent below the level it produced in 1990 (the baseline much of the world—
but not the United States—agreed to pursue in the 1997 Kyoto climate treaty). It is this last measure that
makes California's global warming mission far more sweeping than any nation's, because while countries with
ambitious targets like Germany and Japan have shrinking populations, California will be home to 50 million
people in 2050, two-thirds more than in 1990.
During his inaugural address last year, Brown detoured from the usual platitudes to launch into a lecture on
his environmental policies, from new vehicle and fuel standards to plans for better managing rangelands and
forests. "California, as it does in many areas, must show the way," he told his audience. "We must
demonstrate that reducing carbon is compatible with an abundant economy and human well-being. So far, we
have been able to do that."
But the state's current achievements look easy compared with the new mandates. That's because a lot of lowhanging fruit has already been picked: The best wind power sites are already chock-full of turbines, and
complex land use rules make it difficult to find more locations for massive solar installations. What's more,
scientists and businesspeople will have to come up with new technologies, such as batteries that can hold
enough power for a house at a price most homeowners can afford. And there is no clear understanding of how
much it will cost: Californians may pay higher electricity and fuel prices; carbon-emitting industries may have
to pay more for production. Even then, the gains are fragile and can be undermined by changes in
consumption patterns, the economy or, as took place this past winter in Los Angeles, industrial accidents.
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There, a methane leak from a gas facility which went unplugged for months doubled the annual emissions for
the Los Angeles basin.
Robert Stavins is a professor of environmental economics at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School and has
written extensively on California's approach to climate change. The state's new targets are "very aggressive,
very ambitious," he says. "The more you try to do, the more your marginal costs go up. It doesn't come for
free."
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Brown likes to upend the standard argument about government and regulation. To him, regulations push
businesses to try new things.
To his credit, Brown doesn't make it out to be easy. Speaking during the climate talks at the Petit Palais, an
ornate museum built for the 1900 World Fair, he was particularly blunt about what his plan requires. "You
need the coercive power of government," he told the crowd. One of the reasons why California's utilities
already get so much of their power from renewables, he said, was because "they have no choice. The
government said, 'Do it, or you're going to pay huge fines.'" Brown likes to upend the standard argument
about government regulation gumming up innovation. To him, it's the opposite: Regulations push businesses
to try new things.
Few American politicians would have the pluck to declare this publicly. Yet Brown has a lot of advantages:
He is free from the burden of reelection and for a long time had a supermajority in the Legislature, allowing
him to shove through regulations that would have been dead in the water in any other state.
Brown also has the support of Mary Nichols, who sits at the helm of California's Air Resources Board. No
other agency has quite the same breadth of authority to craft policy—or the same extensive toolbox to enforce
it—and that gives her sway over entire industries. In 2013, Time named Nichols one of the world's 100 most
influential people. In her many years at the Air Resources Board, she's wielded her power to help usher in
everything from three-way catalytic converters and smog tests to cleaner fuels and electric cars.
When I meet Nichols at a café in Los Angeles, she exhibits none of the swagger you often find in a powerful
official. With close-cropped gray hair and wearing a turtleneck sweater, she orders a cup of tea and speaks so
softly that I struggle to hear her over clinking dishes. Despite her unimposing presence, Nichols is supremely
confident about the righteousness of her and Brown's mission. "We made these arguments for a long time, but
we weren't too effective because there weren't many economists on our side. Traditional economic models
view all forms of regulation as costs without benefits." She adds, "I think we've demonstrated that you can
grow your economy and seriously slash global warming." I ask if she looks to any other state or country as a
model. "No, unfortunately, no," she says. "We're it."
TO UNDERSTAND HOW California came to stand alone, you have to look back more than a half century.
Back then, long before "climate change" was a household term, California was choking on smog. A
biochemist at Caltech, Arie Jan Haagen-Smit, had discovered that the problem stemmed from a reaction
between vehicle exhaust and sunlight. Oil and car companies fought Haagen-Smit's findings bitterly, but the
smog problem became so dire that in 1967 Gov. Ronald Reagan signed the bill that created the Air Resources
Board, and he appointed Haagen-Smit to head it. The same year, Congress passed the federal Air Quality Act,
which gave California the power to set its own automobile emissions standards that could exceed those of the
federal government.
But when the Clean Air Act in 1970 required every state to meet pollution standards within five years,
California didn't get a plan in place to do so. In 1972, Nichols, then a young environmental lawyer, sued the
new Environmental Protection Agency to force it to hold California accountable. After Jerry Brown took
office in 1975, he appointed Nichols to the Air Resources Board and made her its chief four years later.
As Nichols began fighting air pollution, Middle Eastern nations, angered at US involvement in the Yom
Kippur War, slapped an embargo on exports of oil and sent prices skyrocketing. Americans waited in long
lines to fill their gas tanks, and shock waves rippled through the economy. Meanwhile, California's population
was burgeoning. In one study from the mid-'70s, the RAND Corporation estimated that the state would have
to add at least 10 new nuclear reactors over the next 25 years to keep pace with the growing demand for
energy.
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A physicist named Arthur Rosenfeld at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory became curious about
how much energy people really consumed. To some of his colleagues, this seemed like a pedestrian topic for
someone who'd studied under Enrico Fermi and distinguished himself in the field of particle physics. But
Rosenfeld soon made a series of calculations that quieted them, recalls Ashok Gadgil, who was then a young
graduate student of Rosenfeld's and is now a senior scientist at the lab. Thanks to lax building codes,
California used about as much energy to heat homes as Minnesota did, despite a 28-degree difference in
average low temperatures, Gadgil says. Rosenfeld was the first to do the math showing how much you could
slow electricity usage by setting in place energy standards for buildings and appliances. "It was a revelation,"
says Gadgil.
The Ocotillo Wind Farm is in Imperial Valley, near the Mexico border. Jamey Stillings
Part of the problem was that the utilities—Pacific Gas & Electric, Southern California Edison, San Diego Gas
& Electric—made more money if they sold people more electricity. PG&E "had people standing on street
corners giving out 200-watt lightbulbs," says Gadgil. Californians would take them home thinking they had
just scored a freebie, screw them in, and double or triple the amount of power those lights were consuming.
To address the energy crisis, Reagan established the California Energy Commission in 1974. Soon after,
Rosenfeld began to push the agency to create tighter building standards, and then to raise them every few
years. He took on everything from the glazing of windows to the type of insulation used between the rafters.
This enraged the utilities, which feared dwindling revenue. At one point a executive called the head of the
lab to demand that Rosenfeld be fired.
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But when Jerry Brown succeeded Reagan, he was captivated by Rosenfeld's findings. So Rosenfeld, who
would later sit on the Energy Commission, helped expand its purview to require that dishwashers,
refrigerators, dryers, heaters, spa equipment—nearly everything in a Californian's life—meet the toughest
efficiency standards in the country. In 1999, Rosenfeld estimated that the changes the commission had set
forth were saving $10 billion a year nationwide.
California decreased its greenhouse gas emissions by 5.5 percent while increasing its gross domestic product
by 17 percent.
The agency has now said that by 2020, all new houses shall meet an exacting code called zero net energy—
this means having features like thick insulation, tightly sealed windows and doors, and the capacity to
generate all the power they need in a year via the sun or even wind. By 2030, all new commercial buildings
will need to do the same.
These energy-saving requirements are just one indicator of how regulators have been able to leverage
California's huge market—38 million customers—to influence national supply and manufacturing lines. Three
years ago, the Energy Commission required that battery-charging systems, like the ones inside smartphones
and laptops, be designed to suck less juice. Manufacturers balked because they didn't want to bear the
additional costs—about 50 cents per laptop. But the state insisted. The extra 50 cents, it turns out, saves the
purchaser 18 times that cost in energy over the life of the product. That one change alone is estimated to save
Californians $300 million a year in electricity bills. The Energy Commission figures that all its efficiency
measures have slashed electric bills in California by $74 billion over the past 40 years.
AS SCIENTISTS SAW increasing evidence of a warming planet, the focus on cutting smog and increasing
efficiency shifted to curbing greenhouse gases. In 2002, Gov. Gray Davis signed the state's first "renewables
portfolio standard," requiring utilities to get 20 percent of their power from renewable sources within 15
years. The standard sparked the development of a first generation of large solar installations, or "grid-scale"
solar, the kind that now dot Kern County. But the rooftop solar business had stalled. "The market was
backwoods hippies and Malibu millionaires," recalls Bernadette Del Chiaro, now the executive director of the
California Solar Energy Industries Association. In 2000, fewer than 400 California roofs were outfitted with
solar panels.
"We had this chicken-and-egg problem," says Del Chiaro. "Prices were high because demand was low.
Demand was low because prices were high." Arnold Schwarzenegger, during his bid to oust Davis via a
recall, promised to jump-start the use of solar power. Schwarzenegger made it to office, but he couldn't get his
advisers to agree on a solar policy. To keep up the pressure, solar advocates crafted life-size cardboard cutouts
of the governor from his Terminator movies and set them up across the state, so voters could pose for pictures
next to them while holding signs that read, "Go Solar."
Still, nothing budged. Schwarzenegger grew frustrated. At one point he convened his staff in the Ronald
Reagan conference room, where he kept his Conan the Barbarian sword. When his advisers again began to
bicker over details, Schwarzenegger's face turned red and veins bulged from his neck. He pounded his fist on
the long wood table and bellowed, "Don't you understand? I want to get this fucking thing done."
That thing turned out to be a carrot in the form of a $3.3 billion rebate program, which, as boring as that
sounds, was monumental. At first, anyone who got rooftop solar received a handsome rebate—as much as
$2.50 per watt. Combined with a federal tax credit, the rebate cut the cost of a typical home system in half.
But the program was designed so that as more solar panels were installed across the state, the rebate money
would be a little less generous.
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Gov. Jerry Brown and Mary Nichols in 2008. David McNew/Getty
This wasn't meant to penalize future homeowners, but to incentivize industry. Jigar Shah was the founder of
SunEdison, one of the early solar-installation companies. The rebate program, he explains, was really a social
compact between the government and the industry. "It was, 'We gave you money, now you go create jobs and
bring down costs,'" he says. Solar installers began popping up all over the state, hiring more workers. The
time it took to install a solar system went from four days to two, and sometimes just a few hours. And prices
fell. Churches, schools, and even prisons started to go solar. Factories in China began ramping up their
production of panels, creating an economy of scale—panel prices have dropped about 45 percent over the past
decade. By the time the subsidies dried up, costs had fallen so much that it didn't matter. "We turned solar into
a real business. This was man-on-the-moon stuff," says Shah.
The way California priced electricity helped too. Remember how used to hand out free high-wattage
lightbulbs to get people to use more power? Now utilities are required to use a tiered electricity-pricing
system. The more power you consume, the higher your rate. This can mean that for people who live in the
desert and need to run an air conditioner half the year, affordable solar can be a godsend. Bakersfield, where
summertime temperatures often climb past 100 degrees, has twice as many solar rooftops as San Francisco,
despite being less than half the size.
But what the $3 billion really did was give the state a new industry—and a lot of new jobs.
IN 2006, the release of the documentary An Inconvenient Truth planted the issue of global warming firmly in
the California consciousness. With that momentum, the head of the Assembly, Fabian Nuñez, was able to
pass the sweeping Global Warming Solutions Act that mandated the state shrink its greenhouse gas emissions
to 1990 levels by 2020. Republican New York Gov. George Pataki flew in to attend the ceremony (the term
"climate change" wasn't yet anathema in Republican politics) and Britain's prime minister, Tony Blair, was
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patched in via a video link. Schwarzenegger boasted, "We will begin a bold new era of environmental
protection here in California that will change the course of history."
The act handed the Air Resources Board an arsenal of new powers, and Schwarzenegger wanted an ace to run
the organization. Mary Nichols had been out of that job for 24 years, and she was a Democrat, but
Schwarzenegger was adamant: "Mary was quite simply the best person for the job," he told Bloomberg
Business.
Her agency was charged with drawing the map for how the state would decarbonize its economy. It hired new
staff to create an inventory of where all the emissions in the state were coming from. It wrote rules for
everything from hair spray to methane escaping from landfills. It levied fines for businesses that didn't
comply and established new regulations for those that did. And most importantly, it set up a cap-and-trade
carbon market, through which California's major industrial players all buy or sell carbon credits—generating
$3.5 billion in revenue for the state so far. In January last year, cap and trade expanded to include emissions
from automobiles, which means companies that refine and sell gasoline must account for those emissions as
well, making the system the most comprehensive of its kind in the world.
No business has felt the force of Nichols' power as much as the automobile industry. The board has steadily
ratcheted up fuel efficiency standards, surpassing federal standards, for cars and trucks. Around 2007, Nichols
began to tell automakers that gasoline efficiency wasn't enough—they would have to roll out new, fully
electric models or other zero-emission vehicles. Manufacturers from Japan to Detroit rushed to build the cars
Nichols demanded. And she upped the ante again: By 2025, fully 16 percent of all new vehicles sold in the
state would have to be zero-emission. Not long ago, though, the board noticed that gas-powered cars coming
off the assembly lines are pretty durable, which means they could be on the road longer. That, of course,
would make it tougher for California to meet its emissions targets, so Nichols has made noise about hitting an
even more ambitious mark: In 15 years, she wants new car buyers to only be able to shop for zero-emission
vehicles.
That seems ambitious, crazy even. After all, the first time California tried to put electric cars on the roads, in
the '90s, manufacturers balked at the high cost of the technology, and the Air Resources Board had to back off
its goals. But this time around, the technology has improved, and Nichols isn't backing down. Today, every
major manufacturer builds an electric car. Some, like Nissan, which builds the Leaf, hail them as a
cornerstone of their brand. "You could say Mary largely created the market for zero-emission vehicles," says
professor Daniel Sperling, director of the University of California-Davis' Institute of Transportation Studies
and a member of the Air Resources Board.
In 2009, Matthew E. Kahn, who teaches environmental economics at the University of Southern California,
was one of several economists who claimed California's cap-and-trade program could cause energy-intensive
industries to flee. Those that couldn't bolt, such as food processors tied to local farms, would be forced to
raise prices on citrus, nuts, or tomatoes, he predicted. Today, Kahn admits the costs for businesses were lower
than he ever imagined. He now believes the impact on jobs was minimal, in part because heavy polluters, like
steelmakers, had already left the state. But he also credits Nichols with having crafted the carbon market so it
achieved the state's goals with minimal costs. "The optimists have won the day," he says.
ALONG WITH BIG rebate programs, the "coercive power of government" helped push cash into the
development of new energy sources, so the utilities found themselves ahead of the deadline to get 20 percent
of their power from renewables. But that created a problem. One very sunny Sunday in April 2014, officials
had to cut off more than 1,100 megawatts' worth of solar and wind power—almost enough to supply all the
houses in the city of Fresno—for about 90 minutes because the grid was overflowing with electricity.
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Naysayers worried the state had reached its
absorption limits for renewables and that the grid
could fry. As a fix, the state expanded the utilities'
ability to trade power with neighboring states on
what is called the energy imbalance market. When
California generates too much solar power, the
utilities can now sell it at 15-minute or even 5minute increments to Washington or Oregon right
away (or buy power when the supply has an
unexpected dip).
A number of tech companies, however, started
looking at better matching supply to demand. First
they turned to "demand response" systems,
whereby major energy customers can ratchet down
their use as needed. Johnson Controls Inc., a
Fortune 500 maker of thermostats, batteries, and
other products, runs a demand response program in
California with more than 100 customers. When a
utility realizes it won't have enough power—when
air conditioners are cranking—it sends a signal to
Johnson Controls, which figures out which
customers can scale back. That may mean cutting
the power to a field of oil wells, or getting the city
of Fullerton to dial back on its lighting at city hall.
Companies love it because they get paid by the
utility when they turn the power off. "I literally
send customers checks," says Johnson Control's
Terrill Laughton. Architects are now designing
office buildings with built-in controls that can
automatically turn off a bank of elevators or a
cooling system when a utility calls.
"We can really transform the grid for the 21st
century," says Raghu Belur, the co-founder of
Enphase, based in Petaluma, north of San
Francisco. His company is connecting solar panels,
software, and a powerful in-home battery to create,
he says, "an energy management system." If the
panels produce power the home doesn't need, the
software detects whether it's better to sell the
excess to the grid or store it for use later. "It
turbocharges the solar system," explains Belur. His
company will soon sell the system in Australia. But
the hurdle is the price of the battery, which is still
too expensive to make it practical for most
homeowners.
Peter Rive, a co-founder of SolarCity, one of the nation's largest installers of solar panels, insists battery
prices are about to tumble—and transform California's energy market. Rive's certainty stems in part from the
massive investment that Elon Musk (who happens to be Rive's cousin and SolarCity's chairman) is making in
batteries for cars and homes. Right now Musk's company Tesla advertises one battery, the Powerwall, that's
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big enough to handle the energy needs of a standard home during the evening. But it can still cost more than
$4,000, including installation. Tesla claims it can fix that problem via economies of scale when it completes a
battery-making "gigafactory" in Nevada.
Rive believes that in a few years home batteries will be commonplace and electricity will be part of the
sharing economy, like Uber and Airbnb. When a utility needs extra electricity, it will be able to call on the
battery in your home to power your neighbor's washing machine, and it will pay you for the power you're
providing. According to Rive, this setup "looks somewhat imminent." He gives it three years. It's a neat and
tidy solution, and full of the usual hubris of Silicon Valley. It is also the kind of innovation Brown is banking
on to achieve his goals.
ALMOST EVERY WEEK a foreign delegation passes through Sacramento to meet California's energy
leaders. Recently, officials from China, India, South Africa, Mexico, and even Germany have all visited.
Tatiana Molina was part of a delegation of Chilean officials and businesspeople who came last October. They
met with utilities, toured the Tesla headquarters, and listened to presentations from government
administrators. She was impressed. Then again, she was also skeptical. "You cannot take a California model
and paste it in Chile," she said.
Others warn that California will have trouble keeping up the pace without inflicting damage on its economy.
"What [California] can certainly not do," says Stavins, the Harvard economist, "is ramp up its policies at no
cost. To think that it can, that's just naive." Gino DiCaro of the California Manufacturers and Technology
Association says, "Everyone knows it's going to be more costly to operate in California—that's just a given.
But the costs are mounting and no one knows where they will end."
It is also sobering that the world's other great experiment in greenhouse gas reduction, Germany, has stumbled
recently. In the early 2000s, Germany began a massive effort called Energiewende, or "energy transition."
The country guaranteed that anyone who installed solar or wind panels could sell the power at a high fixed
rate, and investors piled in. But the rate was so generous that Germany had to pass the costs onto its
consumers, raising bills by about $220 a year per household. When the country also began to shutter its
nuclear plants, utilities turned to the cheapest source of new power available: carbon-heavy lignite coal.
Germany is now burning more coal than it did five years ago, and during 2012 and 2013 its greenhouse gas
emissions actually increased. (They are now falling again.)
To make matters worse, Europe's cap-and-trade system, responsible for limiting emissions across the
continent, has been beset by fraud, as phony carbon credits from Russia and Ukraine have flooded the market.
That has helped drive down the cost of carbon. For much of the last year it hovered around 7 euros, or about
35 percent cheaper than the price of carbon in California, almost wiping out incentives not to pollute.
Brown also has strong forces arrayed against him. The utilities have started to flex their muscles, pushing
back against the rates they pay solar customers for the power they send to the grid. And last year, the oil
industry lobby led an unprecedented $11 million campaign against measures including a component of SB
350, the landmark law that requires California to get half its electricity from renewables in the next 15 years.
The lobby singled out the Air Resources Board and its "unelected bureaucrats," warning that the bill's
provisions for cutting petroleum use in half by 2030 would lead to sky-high gas prices. The bill passed, but
the oil companies got the petroleum mandate stripped out at the last minute by aiming hard at legislators from
the Central Valley.
To reach her goal, Nichols has to get close to 1.5 million zero-emission cars on the road in the next decade.
Brown admitted partial defeat during a press conference at the state Capitol: "Oil has won the skirmish. But
they've lost the bigger battle because I am more determined than ever." He made that quite clear when he
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stated that the Air Resources Board has all the power that it needs to cut petroleum use, and "it will continue
to exercise that power, certainly as long as I'm governor." He added, "Through the regulations on low-carbon
fuel, we'll take another step, and we'll continue to take steps."
"Who opposes any of our work on climate? There is no question that everywhere you turn it all goes back to
the oil industry," says Nichols.
The oil industry does loom large over her biggest task ahead. The transportation sector accounts for 37
percent of California's greenhouse gas emissions. Just overhauling the freight rail system, she says, "will
require massive new investment, and no one really knows where it is going to come from." Despite a $2,500
rebate that has been dangling out there for six years, only about 175,000 cars in the state are electric—which
means that to reach her ultimate goal, Nichols has to get close to 1.5 million zero-emission cars on the road in
the next decade. She concedes that the carrots she's had in place for some time, such as allowing electric
vehicles to cruise carpool lanes, won't be as effective going forward because those "lanes are not infinitely
stuffable." Like Brown, though, she continues to optimistically push ahead: "The only clash is over how much
of an incentive it's going to take to get these [electric vehicles] into consumers' hands."
AT THE PARIS climate summit, Brown and Schwarzenegger jaunted around together, available for photo
ops. It was as if to say: Here are a Democrat and a Republican (with a face recognizable around the world),
hand in hand, dedicated to the cause. Even Kern County's Rep. Kevin McCarthy—a tireless advocate for the
oil business—has become a booster for the solar industry.
But here's a key bit of context for all of the state's efforts. Even if the state succeeds in slashing carbon levels,
it would still only result in a blip in combating climate change. California is the world's eighth-largest
economy but accounts for only about 1 percent of global emissions. That, says Nichols, is exactly the point: to
set an example. "We never thought that what we did in California was actually going to solve the problem of
global warming," she says. "But we thought we could demonstrate that you could."
http://m.motherjones.com/environment/2016/03/california-cuts-greenhouse-gas-jerry-brown-growth-energy
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Volcanic eruptions: How bubbles lead to disaster
April 13, 2016
Source:
ETH Zurich
Summary:
Why are volcanologists interested in vapor bubbles? Because they can accumulate in a magma
reservoir underneath a volcano, priming it to explode. Researchers have now discovered how
bubbles are able to accumulate in the magma.
FULL STORY
Simulation of buoyant bubbles in crystal-rich magma (blue layer) and in an crystal-poor melt (top layer).
Credit: Graphics: Andrea Parmigiani / ETH Zurich
In 1816, summer failed to make an appearance in central Europe and people were starving. Just a year earlier,
the Tambora volcano had erupted in Indonesia, spewing huge amounts of ash and sulphur into the
atmosphere. As these particles partly blocked sunlight, cooling the climate, it had a serious impact on the land
and the people, even in Switzerland.
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Since then, volcanologists have developed more precise ideas of why super-volcanoes such as Tambora are
not only highly explosive but also why they release so much sulphur into the atmosphere.
Gas bubbles tend to accumulate in the upper layers of magma reservoirs, which are only a few kilometres
beneath the earth's surface, building up pressure that can then be abruptly liberated by eruption. These bubbles
mainly contain water vapour but also sulphur.
Sulphur-rich eruptions
"Such volcanic eruptions can be extremely powerful and spew an enormous amount of ash and sulphur to the
surface," says Andrea Parmigiani, a post-doc in the Institute of Geochemistry and Petrology at ETH Zurich.
"We've known for some time that gas bubbles play a major role in such events, but we had only been able to
speculate on how they accumulate in magma reservoirs."
Together with other scientists from ETH Zurich and Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech), the
researchers studied the behaviour of bubbles with a computer model.
The scientists used theoretical calculations and laboratory experiments to examine in particular how bubbles
in crystal-rich and crystal-poor layers of magma reservoirs move buoyantly upward. In many volcanic
systems, the magma reservoir consists mainly of two zones: an upper layer consisting of viscous melt with
almost no crystals, and a lower layer rich in crystals, but still containing pore space.
Super bubbles meander through a maze
When Andrea Parmigiani, Christian Huber and Olivier Bachmann started this project, they thought that the
bubbles, as they moved upwards through crystal-rich areas of the magma reservoirs, would dramatically slow
down, while they would go faster in the crystal-poor zones.
"Instead, we found that, under volatile-rich conditions, they would ascend much faster in the crystal-rich
zones, and accumulate in the melt-rich portions above" says Parmigiani.
Parmigiani explains this as follows: when the proportion of bubbles in the pore space of the crystal-rich layers
increases, small individual bubbles coalesce into finger-like channels, displacing the existing highly viscous
melt. These finger-like channels allow for a higher vertical gas velocity. The bubbles, however, have to fill at
least 10 to 15 % of the pore space.
"If the vapour phase cannot form these channels, individual bubbles are mechanically trapped," says the earth
scientist. As these finger-like channels reach the boundary of the crystal-poor melt, individual, more spherical
bubbles detach, and continue their ascent towards the surface. However, the more bubble, the more reduce
their migration velocity is.
This is because each bubble creates a return flow of viscous melt around it. When an adjacent bubble feels
this return flow, it is slowed down. This process was demonstrated in a laboratory experiment conducted by
Parmigiani's colleagues Salah Faroughi and Christian Huber at Georgia Tech, using water bubbles in a
viscous silicone solution.
"Through this mechanism, a large number of gas bubbles can accumulate in the crystal-poor melt under the
roof of the magma reservoir. This eventually leads to overpressurization of the reservoir," says lead author
Parmigiani. And because the bubbles also contain sulphur, this also accumulates, explaining why such a
volcano might emit more sulphur than expected based on its composition.
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What this means for the explosivity of a given volcano is still unclear. "This study focuses primarily on
understanding the basic principles of gas flow in magma reservoirs; a direct application to prediction of
volcanic behaviour remains a question for the future," says the researcher, adding that existing computer
models do not depict the entire magma reservoir, but only a tiny part of it: roughly a square of a few cubic
centimeter with a clear boundary between the crystal-poor and crystal-rich layers.
To calculate this small volume, Parmigiani used high-performance computers such as the Euler Cluster at
ETH Zurich and a supercomputer at the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre in Lugano.
For the software, the researcher had access to the open-source library Palabos, which he continues to develop
in collaboration with researchers from University of Geneva. "This software is particularly suitable for this
type of simulation," says the physicist.
Story Source:
The above post is reprinted from materials provided by ETH Zurich. The original item was written by Peter
Rüegg. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.
Journal Reference:
1.
A. Parmigiani, S. Faroughi, C. Huber, O. Bachmann, Y. Su. Bubble accumulation and its role in the evolution
of magma reservoirs in the upper crust. Nature, 2016; DOI: 10.1038/nature17401
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/04/160413135719.htm
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Coming Soon to France: Hundreds of Miles of Solar-Powered Roads
Thin panels installed on existing roads could be used to power streetlights and homes within five years.

JULIAN SPECTOR

@JulianSpector
Colas / Joachim Bertrand
Sooner or later the lamps glowing softly over the Champs-Élysées could be powered by the road itself.
France plans to install 1,000 kilometers of solar panel roadways in the next five years, Global Construction
Review reports. That’s an ambitious goal, but not at all out of reach, because the technology is ready to go:
the 7-millimeter-thick photovoltaic panel called Wattway, produced by French transportation infrastructure
firm Colas. These panels can glue onto existing road surfaces to draw power from the sun, while providing
enough grip for cars and trucks to drive over them. Colas says one kilometer is enough to power public
lighting for a city of 5,000 people and 20 square meters of Wattway can power a single French home.
This project joins a growing trend in urban innovation. A couple in Idaho raisedmore than $2 million to
develop their own version of smart, solar panel road surfaces (their panels incorporate programmable LED
lights and heating elements for melting snow). The Dutch SolaRoad project in Krommenie, which is actually
a solar-paneled bike path, generated more electricity than expectedin its pilot phase. The U.K., taking the
inverse approach, is looking into roads that can transmit electricity to charge electric cars on the move.
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(Colas / Joachim Bertrand)
The French effort offers a possible advantage over other approaches: It can be installed easily on top of
existing roads, sidestepping the costly need to build new ones. And even though this technology probably
won’t produce electricity more cheaply than conventional solar, it is a more efficient use of land.
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France’s investment in this improvement will show the world how it works at a larger scale than previous
endeavors, and how the wear and tear of real-world driving affects the panels. If the road underneath a
Wattway installation needs repairs, will the panels need to be torn up? With several different versions of a
similar technology now working their way into use, sustainably minded cities stand to benefit from the
friendly competition driving down costs and differentiating the strengths and weaknesses of each approach.
Who needs aSun King when you can have Sun Roads?
http://www.citylab.com/tech/2016/02/france-roads-made-from-solarpanels/462045/?utm_source=nl__link4_021016
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Dostoyevsky on the Heart vs. the Mind and How We Come to Know Truth
“Nature, the soul, love, and God, one recognizes through the heart, and not through the reason… Reason is a
tool, a machine, which is driven by the spiritual fire.”
BY MARIA POPOVA
“Emotions are not just the fuel that powers the psychological mechanism of a reasoning creature,” Martha
Nussbaum — one of the most insightful and influential philosophers of our time — asserted in her terrific
treatise on the intelligence of the emotions. “They are parts, highly complex and messy parts, of this
creature’s reasoning itself.” It’s an idea proposed — and resisted — for centuries, if not millennia. “The heart
has its reasons, which reason does not know,” Blaise Pascal wrote in contemplating intuition and the
intellect in the 17th century.
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But perhaps the most beautiful meditation on this abiding tug-of-war between reason and emotion comes not
from a hoary philosopher but from a teenage boy — one who would grow up to become the greatest
psychological writer of all time.
Decades before he found the meaning of life in a dream and was fortunate to find himself in one of history’s
most beautiful loves, Fyodor Dostoyevsky (November 11, 1821–February 9, 1881) tussled with the interplay
of the heart and the mind in how we come to know truth. In an 1838 letter to his brother Mikhail, penned
shortly before his seventeenth birthday and included in Letters of Fyodor Michailovitch Dostoyevsky to His
Family and Friends (public library), Dostoyevsky accuses his brother of being apt to “philosophize like a
poet” and writes:
To know more, one must feel less, and vice versa… Nature, the soul, love, and God, one recognizes through
the heart, and not through the reason. Were we spirits, we could dwell in that region of ideas over which our
souls hover, seeking the solution. But we are earth-born beings, and can only guess at the Idea — not grasp it
by all sides at once. The guide for our intelligences through the temporary illusion into the innermost centre of
the soul is calledReason.
Now, Reason is a material capacity, while the soul or spirit lives on the thoughts which are whispered by the
heart. Thought is born in the soul. Reason is a tool, a machine, which is driven by the spiritual fire. When
human reason … penetrates into the domain of knowledge, it works independently of the feeling, and
consequently of the heart.
He comes full-circle to the divergent ways in which poetry and philosophy bring us into contact with truth,
both necessary but one, in his view, superior:
Philosophy cannot be regarded as a mere equation where nature is the unknown quantity! Remark that the
poet, in the moment of inspiration, comprehends God, and consequently does the philosopher’s work.
Consequently poetic inspiration is nothing less than philosophical inspiration. Consequently philosophy is
nothing but poetry, a higher degree of poetry!
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Complement this particular fragment of Letters of Fyodor Michailovitch Dostoyevsky to His Family and
Friends with British economic theorist and philosopher E.F. Schumacher, writing a century and a half later,
on how to see with the eye of the heart, then revisit Dostoyevsky on why there are no bad people and his
beloved wife on the secret to a happy marriage.
https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/03/31/dostoyevsky-reasonemotion/?mc_cid=eef0166e83&mc_eid=d1c16ac662
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Prehistoric peepers give vital clue in solving 300-million-year-old 'Tully Monster'
Ancient 'Tully Monster' was a vertebrate
April 13, 2016
Source:
University of Leicester
Summary:
A 300-million-year-old fossil mystery has been solved by a research team which has identified that
the ancient 'Tully Monster' was a vertebrate -- due to the unique characteristics of its eyes.
FULL STORY
This is an image of the 'Tully Monster' fossil and 'meatball' and 'sausage' melanosomes.
Credit: University of Leicester
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A 300-million-year-old fossil mystery has been solved by a research team led by the University of Leicester,
which has identified that the ancient 'Tully Monster' was a vertebrate -- due to the unique characteristics of its
eyes.
Tullimonstrum gregarium or as it is more commonly known the 'Tully Monster', found only in coal quarries in
Illinois, Northern America, is known to many Americans because its alien-like image can be seen on the sides
of large U-haul™ trailers which ply the freeways.
Despite being an iconic image -- a fossil with a striped body, large tail, a pair of stalks terminating in dark,
oval-shaped 'blobs' and a large elephant trunk-like proboscis at the head end which has a pincer-like claw
filled with teeth -- it is a complete mystery as to what kind of extinct animal it was.
Professor Sarah Gabbott from the University of Leicester's Department of Geology said: "Since its discovery
over 60 years ago scientists have suggested it is a whole parade of completely different creatures ranging from
molluscs to worms -- but there was no conclusive evidence and so speculation continued."
Thomas Clements, a PhD student from the University of Leicester and lead author on the paper, explained:
"When a fossil has anatomy this bizarre it's difficult to know where to start, so we decided to look at the most
striking feature -- the stalked structures with dark blobs."
This proved to be the vital clue the team needed to solve the mystery.
In a new study published in Nature, the University of Leicester palaeontologists, along with colleagues at the
University of Bristol and the University of Texas in Austin, discovered that the dark 'blobs' were actually
made up of hundreds of thousands of microscopic dark granules, each 50 times smaller than the width of a
human hair.
The shape and chemical composition of these granules is identical to organelles found in cells called
melanosomes; these being responsible for creating and storing the pigment melanin.
Dr Jakob Vinther (University of Bristol) said: "We used a new technique called Time of Flight Secondary Ion
Mass Spectrometry (ToF-SIMS) to identify the chemical signature of the fossil granules and compared it to
known modern melanin from crows and this proved that we had discovered the oldest fossil pigment currently
known."
Thomas added: "Nearly all animals can produce the pigment melanin. It's what gives humans the range of
skin and hair colours we see today. Melanin is also found in the eyes of many animal groups where it stops
light from bouncing around inside the eyeball and allows the formation of a clear visual image."
Identifying fossil melanosomes containing melanin and a lens is the first time it has been conclusively proved
that Tullimonstrum had eyes on stalks.
When the team looked closer at the melanosomes they made another exciting discovery.
Professor Gabbott said: "There were two distinct shapes of melanosomes in Tullimonstrum's eyes: some look
like microscopic 'sausages' and others like microscopic 'meatballs'. This evidence was crucial because only
vertebrates have two different shapes of melanosome, meaning that unlike previous researchers that thought
that Tullimonstrum was an invertebrate (animal without a backbone), this is the first unequivocal evidence
that Tullimonstrum is a member of the same group of animals as us, the vertebrates."
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Thomas added: "This is an exciting study because not have we discovered the oldest fossil pigment, but the
structures seen in Tullimonstrum's eyes suggest it had good vision. The large tail and teeth suggest that the
Tully Monster is in fact a type of very weird fish."
Story Source:
The above post is reprinted from materials provided by University of Leicester. Note: Materials may be edited
for content and length.
Journal Reference:
1.
Thomas Clements, Andrei Dolocan, Peter Martin, Mark A. Purnell, Jakob Vinther, Sarah E. Gabbott. The
eyes of Tullimonstrum reveal a vertebrate affinity. Nature, 2016; DOI: 10.1038/nature17647
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/04/160413135659.htm
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At the Movies
Michael Wood
‘We’d all be human if we could,’ a sinister character sings in The Threepenny Opera. His hypocrisy is
unmistakable, but the ironic implication may also be right. We don’t all want to be human, even if it’s
possible. We have other ambitions. Still, the relevant characters in the singer’s world and in ours are human in
the standard, technical sense, even if some are fictional.
What happens when man-made creatures express the same aspiration, without any sort of irony in range? The
event occurs quite often in graphic novels and Gothic tales, and the pathos relies on a fairly secure distinction:
these figures want to be human but can’t, we are human but don’t behave as if we were. But then sometimes
the distinction collapses, or is displaced, as in Charlie Kaufman and Duke Johnson’s stop-motion
filmAnomalisa, based on a play Kaufman wrote in 2005. When Michael Stone, the author of a bestselling
book about improving human relations in business, has a psychological meltdown, we don’t quite know what
sort of mind he is supposed to have, because he and everyone else in his world is a doll; the whole population
is represented by stiff-limbed, mask-wearing puppets with disproportionately sized heads. Would they be
human if they could? Are they human enough already?
The masks are especially important because they display rather than disguise an aspect of the film’s creation.
In so-called replacement animation, you make different face parts and shoot them a frame at a time, putting
sequences together to create the illusion of movement. You then erase the differences between the face parts.
In this case the differences were kept, in the form of a clear line of division between the upper and lower parts
of the face. We cannot at any point think these masks are anything other than masks. ‘We liked the quality,’
Kaufman said, ‘a fragileness and broken quality.’ This is certainly what comes across when the lower half of
Stone’s mask falls off, and we see an expanse of clay-like material with a round hole in the middle of it. He
picks up his half-mask and puts it on again, restored to whatever reality he is supposed to represent.
But the line between the upper and lower faces does something else. It makes us wonder why the creatures are
wearing masks, why a whole species would seem to have something to hide. The apparent theme of the movie
suggests they might be hiding the fact that they are all the same; but of course the masks reinforce this effect
rather than reduce it. Much of the dialogue and imagery does the same. Stone is in Cincinnati to talk about his
book, and people and posters all talk about the zoo and the famous local chilli. At one point Stone feels that
everyone else, except himself and Lisa, a woman he has met in his hotel, is the same (‘Everyone is one person
but you and me’), a theory brilliantly supported by the fact that everyone else, including Stone’s wife and
friends, an old flame, the hotel manager, a taxi-driver, various waiters and many others, has only one voice,
that of Tom Noonan. Within the story the theory is wrong, the scenario of a dream from which Stone awakes,
but points in the right direction, like the song inThe Threepenny Opera. The others are not just one person,
they are as different from each other as Stone himself is from them: not much. They’re all made by the same
studio and in the same style. The hotel, incidentally, is called the Fregoli, mispronounced in various ways by
characters in the movie – a touching sign of independent existence when we get (as I didn’t at first) the glance
at the Fregoli delusion, in which difference vanishes into the idea that other people are just one person.
There are really two films in Anomalisa, and our awareness of the masks and movements of the dolls plays a
part in both. One is Stone’s film, the one he would make if he were the writer and director. It is about anomie
rather than anomalies, and concerns a sad, sensitive fellow at a crucial point in his life. He is bored by his
marriage, remote from his son, tired of his book and fame, and feels he is losing everything and everyone. ‘I
think I might have psychological problems,’ he says, but of course he has no means of consulting his
programmer. He sees an old girlfriend, whom he abandoned 11 years ago – we saw him reading an angry note
from her on the plane, so she’s on his mind, and she lives in Cincinnati – but only bewilderment comes of the
encounter.
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Then the miracle happens. He meets Lisa, who is so ordinary she seems real, and who, like him, has a voice
of her own. In her case it’s that of Jennifer Jason Leigh, in his it’s David Thewlis, Lancashire accent and all.
Lisa loves Cyndi Lauper, offers a plausible rendering of one her songs (‘Girls Just Want to Have Fun’), and is
generally so original in her sweetness and modesty that Stone, all but deadened by the repetitive behaviours
around him, can’t resist her. After a sex scene that would feel long with skilful humans and feels twice as long
with awkward dolls – the ‘broken quality’ the directors are after, perhaps, where ‘broken’ means stumbling –
both characters sleep, and over breakfast Stone declares his new resolution. He will leave his marriage and
run away with Lisa. She says yes, and almost at once, after a few feeble attempts at looking happy, he begins
to find fault with her. She clicks her fork against her teeth when she eats, she talks with her mouth full, she
starts telling him what to do, and worst of all, another voice, Noonan’s voice, begins to speak in unison with
hers. She’s not so different after all, she’s also part of the world he thought he could leave. So he goes home
to his sad marriage, glumly wondering why all this is happening to him. Or why nothing ever happens to him.
In this film, the one puppet who thinks he is human, an exception to a hideously monotonous rule, learns once
again that nothing is going to change. Of course he knew this, he had only to look at his sectioned face in the
mirror. But how brave of him to try to resist destiny, especially since it takes the form of his own computerdesigned personality.
The other film might have been made by Lisa if she knew how to make movies and were a good deal meaner
than she is. In this one there is no mystery about Stone’s behaviour. He couldn’t make a commitment to his
old flame for the same reason he can’t commit to his marriage – or anything else but his own self-absorption.
The eternal sameness of everyone else is not a fact of this film’s life but a projection of Stone’s defence
against experience; of his unacknowledged clinging to a lonely male stereotype. Lisa is an exception, an
Anomalisa as Stone puts it, and for a while he believes he has escaped into a world where differentiated
people exist, or where at least one other such person exists. But it doesn’t last, not because Lisa fails him but
because he doesn’t want to escape, because he prefers his protective misery to the risks of a new life, and so
takes shelter in the conventionality he pretends to find so tiresome. He doesn’t understand any of this, and so
feels entitled to his sadness and sense of superiority, and in this film our awareness that he is after all a doll
among other dolls makes him seem deluded rather than aspiring, a man who can’t see that differences matter
more where differences are small.
Making his speech to a large audience, Stone has a sort of breakdown, and joins the chorus of bots wondering
about humanity. ‘What is it to be human?’ he asks. ‘What is it to ache?’ If to ache is human (and to feel fit is
divine) Stone is doing pretty well; but is this enough? At the end of the movie Stone reads a friendly note
from Lisa telling him she had a good time, and has looked up the word ‘anomalisa’ in her Japanese dictionary.
It means ‘goddess of the sun’. He still doesn’t know what he’s missed.
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n08/michael-wood/at-the-movies
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Origin of life: Temperature gradients within pores in rock could have separated primitive biopolymers
Date:
April 13, 2016
Source:
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet Muenchen (LMU)
Summary:
Physicists report that temperature gradients within pores in rock could have separated primitive
biopolymers on the basis of their sequences -- a vital precondition for the formation of selfreplicating systems in the primordial ocean.
FULL STORY
Red hot lava flowing into Pacific Ocean on Big Island, Hawaii.
Credit: © juancat / Fotolia
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Physicists from Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet (LMU) in Munich report that temperature gradients within
pores in rock could have separated primitive biopolymers on the basis of their sequences -- a vital
precondition for the formation of self-replicating systems in the primordial ocean.
The earliest phase in the process that gave rise to living organisms on our planet is thought to have involved
selective interactions between simple prebiotic molecules that enabled them to form progressively more
complex chemical structures. These metastable structures eventually became capable of storing genetic
information and transmitting it by self-replication. The most likely candidates for such self-replicating
systems are polymeric molecules made up of subunits called ribonucleotides. These RNA molecules in turn
could have provided the starting point for biological evolution, which led to the first cell and everything that
followed. Christof Mast and Dieter Braun (Professor of Systems Biophysics at LMU) have been exploring
how precursor molecules such as ribonucleotides (and the deoxyribonucleotides of the hereditary material
DNA) present in Earth's primordial ocean could have accumulated locally in concentrations high enough to
permit them to interact.
But how was the wheat separated from the chaff in such systems? In other words, what mechanism could
have separated 'useful' from 'useless' RNA molecules, and concentrated the former sufficiently to give them a
chance to interact with other RNA chains and be elongated? New work by Braun, who is also a member of the
Nanosystems Initiative Munich (NIM) and the Center for NanoScience (CeNS), together with Christof Mast
and Matthias Morasch, points to a possible answer. In earlier laboratory experiments, Braun and his
colleagues have shown that temperature differences in tiny water-filled channels, such as those found at
hydrothermal vents and in the igneous rock extruded at mid-ocean ridges, are able to partition DNA
molecules based on their lengths. Now they demonstrate that the same mechanism can also sort DNA strands
that differ in their nucleotide sequences from each other. Their findings appear in the latest issue of the
journal "Angewandte Chemie."
Sequence-dependent partitioning
Instead of samples of porous rock, the LMU researchers used glass capillary tubes filled with an aqueous
solution containing mixtures of two DNA fragments with slightly different nucleotide sequences for their
experiments. "DNA is chemically closely related to RNA and behaves in a similar way under our
experimental conditions. But it is more stable and therefore easier to handle," says Matthias Morasch, first
author of the new study. The DNA-containing glass "pores" were then heated from one side, generating a
gradient of approximately 17°C within the capillary, and the distribution of the DNA molecules was analyzed.
Under these conditions, the different DNA molecules were found to separate into homogeneous, highly
concentrated assemblies, depending on their sequences and their ability to interact with each other via
complementary base-pairing. Thus in addition to sorting molecules according to their lengths, temperature
differences can also drive sequence-dependent sorting. Both effects are based on the phenomenon of
thermophoresis, the differential response of components of molecular mixtures to temperature gradients.
"The separation is so effective that certain types of fragments actually condense into gels when they hybridize
with complementary partner molecules. -- Even more strikingly, sequences that differ by only a few bases are
partitioned into different gels," Mast explains. This degree of specificity was a big surprise, for DNA gels
formed by drying show no evidence of sequence-dependent differentiation. This argues that it is the
temperature gradient within the pores that makes the crucial difference. "Settings in which pores in volcanic
rock were exposed to directional heat flow were probably very common on the young Earth," says Braun. So
temperature-driven sorting may well have provided an important mechanism for the partitioning and
concentration of biomolecules that could readily interact with each other, thus allowing them to form longer
and longer polymer chains -- the essential prerequisite for the origin of life.
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Story Source:
The above post is reprinted from materials provided by Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet Muenchen
(LMU). Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.
Journal Reference:
1.
Matthias Morasch, Dieter Braun, Christof B. Mast. Heat-Flow-Driven Oligonucleotide Gelation Separates
Single-Base Differences.Angewandte Chemie, 2016; DOI: 10.1002/ange.201601886
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/04/160413113436.htm
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Living Happily Ever After
Martin Filler
APRIL 21, 2016 ISSUE
Robert Adams/Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco
Colorado Springs, Colorado, 1968; photograph by Robert Adams from his 1974 book The New West, to be
reissued by Steidl this April. His exhibition ‘Around the House and Other New Work’ is on view at the
Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco, March 10–April 23, with a monograph published by the gallery.
Houses for a New World: Builders and Buyers in American Suburbs, 1945–1965
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by Barbara Miller Lane
Princeton University Press, 305 pp., $49.95
Detached America: Building Houses in Postwar Suburbia
by James A. Jacobs
University of Virginia Press, 261 pp., $45.00
1.
Although the Great Recession was set off when the United States housing bubble burst in 2007, amnesiac
Americans are again speculating in domestic real estate. The steep rise in property values during the final two
decades of the twentieth century still lingers in many people’s minds, as does the widespread memory among
the baby-boom generation that the family house was the best investment their parents ever made. Perhaps we
have not reverted to pre-crash irrational exuberance, but people seemingly cannot resist the temptation to
“flip” residential real estate—that is, buying and reselling in the short term to make a quick profit.
Recovery in the national housing market remains spotty—7.4 million home mortgages are seriously
“underwater” (i.e., the balance of the loan is more than 25 percent higher than the property’s current assessed
value)—but a healthy local economy can support flipping even modest residences. Several cable TV channels
broadcast series that follow this process, including Flip This House, Flipping Virgins, Rehab Addict, and my
personal favorite, Flip or Flop. This program stars a telegenic young Southern California couple who take
down-at-the-heels Orange County tract houses, remodel them to suit contemporary tastes (loftlike “open
concept” floor plans, spa-inspired bathrooms, and obligatory granite kitchen countertops), and often make a
five-figure return on their investment (although some of their cost estimates can seem low and their
completion schedules speedy to anyone who has ever done home improvements).
Flip or Flop and other examples of what has been called real estate porn remind us that there is a huge
inventory of postwar suburban housing stock all around the country, much of it in the style we now call
midcentury modern, although more exists in hybrid modes that mix traditional and contemporary elements.
Millions of detached single-family houses were erected on the outskirts of American cities between the end of
wartime building material restrictions in 1947 and the onset of the oil embargo recession in 1973, but two new
books differ greatly on the exact number.
Barbara Miller Lane’s Houses for a New World puts the figure for the first two postwar decades at thirteen
million, whereas James A. Jacobs’s Detached America states that during the quarter-century after the war
“private builders and building companies constructed about 35,500,000 housing units…[of which] the
overwhelming majority…were the detached single-family houses that define suburbia.” Even adjusting for a
somewhat different time frame, there is no question that the mass migration at midcentury—by 1950 more
Americans lived in suburbs than in cities—represented a thoroughgoing reformulation of our domestic
landscape and a colossal demographic upheaval.
This immense shift grew out of the pent-up demand created by nearly two decades of severely curtailed
construction during the Great Depression and World War II. The acute housing shortage was exacerbated by a
sharp increase in postwar birth rates, which resulted in a frenzy of suburban residential development that had
been anticipated for some time. For if planners could not have predicted the back-to-back economic and
military traumas of the 1930s and 1940s, housing reformers had long foreseen a looming crisis in the
uncontrolled increase of urban centers.
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The proliferation of automobile ownership during the century’s second and third decades gave new impetus to
the Garden Cities movement, founded in 1898 by the British planning theorist Ebenezer Howard, who
opposed unlimited urban growth in favor of multiple, moderate-sized “conurbations” with dwellings and
workplaces in convenient proximity. Such medium-density centers would ideally be surrounded by
undeveloped “greenbelts” for recreation and as barriers against pollution. Yet this congenial middle ground
between urban overcrowding and rural isolation made little headway in the US, despite the advocacy of the
critic Lewis Mumford and his fellow members of the Regional Planning Association of America, which was
organized in 1923 by the architect and planner Clarence Stein.
A rare application of Garden City principles in this country was Radburn, New Jersey, of 1928–1930, Stein
and Henry Wright’s only partially realized but nonetheless internationally influential “New Town for the
Motor Age.” Yet however intelligently Radburn accommodated the burgeoning car culture, it did not
incorporate businesses (beyond a few shops for local residents) and became a commuter suburb, albeit a very
fine one, for people with jobs in nearby cities, especially New York. Importantly, Radburn was predicated on
the radical belief of the nineteenth-century political economist Henry George that “we must make land
common property.” Thus, although Radburn’s homeowners hold title to their dwellings, the ground beneath
their houses is retained in trust for all by a cooperative association. This egalitarian principle removed a major
financial incentive that typically drives developers and investors who can gain from sale of unbuilt plots
(usually at steadily increasing prices) if a community thrives, and the Radburn idea never caught on in the US.
The great unanswered question about the suburbanization of mid-twentieth-century America is this: Could it
have been done better? Certainly a better way was shown by the Case Study House group—the loose
association of like-minded Modernist architects organized in 1945 by John Entenza, the editor of the
California-based Arts & Architecture magazine, who solicited superior prototypes for residential living from
some of the period’s most imaginative designers. However, their plans were neither conceived for mass
production nor geared to providing the cheapest possible dwelling per square foot. Affordability, not design
distinction, was the overriding motivation for the best-known postwar tract house manufacturers, the Levitt
brothers—William, who headed the company (established in 1929 by their father, Abraham), and Arthur, its
chief architect and planner.
The Levitt firm had built high-end houses on Long Island before World War II, but when the founder’s sons
served in the military they observed a number of industrialized engineering and construction techniques that
could be profitably applied to the mass production of lower-priced dwellings for returning servicemen, the
postwar period’s most obvious growth market. To cut expenses, the Levitts’ no-frills, wood-frame structures
did not have an excavated basement, but instead were erected atop a concrete slab poured directly onto the
ground and inlaid with radiant heating (a method Frank Lloyd Wright pioneered in his low-cost Usonian
houses of the 1930s onward, which featured several concepts that Arthur Levitt proudly admitted he’d swiped
from the grand old master).
Although it is often assumed that Levitt houses were prefabricated, they were merely standardized, with
interchangeable components and simplified assembly strategies that resulted in considerable economies.
Therefore the company could deliver compact, freestanding “minimum houses”—a term that originated in
Weimar Germany’s social-housing movement as das Existenzminimum (the minimum required dwelling
area)—that war veterans could buy for less per month in total carrying charges than the going rental rates for
many city apartments. The Levitt company required no down payment, and the low-interest, thirty-year
mortgages provided by the Federal Housing Administration to vets put these houses within easy reach of even
those with moderate incomes. Who could resist owning a brand-new homestead in the countryside with the
last word in kitchens and bathrooms, instead of leasing an old inner-city flat with a claw-foot tub and no
backyard?
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The first houses offered by the Levitts in their now-famous development in Hempstead, New York, thirtyseven miles east of Manhattan—initially called Island Trees but renamed Levittown after marketers
discovered that the family name signified quality to consumers—were completed in 1947. (They were
initially for rent only, with an option to buy after one year, but became available for outright purchase in
1949.) The 750-square-foot floor plan comprised a living room, kitchen, two bedrooms, and one bathroom,
with an unfinished partial attic space suitable for future expansion. This tidy Cape Cod cottage sold for $6,990
(more than $77,000 in current value), but the brothers soon found that buyers would willingly pay somewhat
more for upgrades, and in 1949 they introduced an equally successful eight-hundred- square-foot ranch-style
version for $7,990 (equivalent to nearly $78,000 in 2015). Today the median size of new single-family
American houses is 2,521 square feet, more than three times larger than the Levitts’ first offering.
Warwick Historical Society
The cover of a Cinderella Homes sales brochure, 1955–1957; from Barbara Miller Lane’s Houses for a New
The brothers’ venture into mass production was backed up by the bountiful provision of benefits through the
Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944. Commonly called the GIBill, it contrasted dramatically with the
disgraceful treatment of World War I veterans at the onset of the Great Depression, when the 1932 Bonus
Army March on Washington was violently suppressed. Together with generous tuition subsidies for former
servicemen—this country’s most extensive foray into socialized higher education—the 67,000 mortgages
guaranteed through the GI Bill made home ownership possible for more citizens than ever before (except
nonwhites, who received fewer than one hundred of those loans). To take advantage of this bonanza in
government-guaranteed financing, canny entrepreneurs across the country quickly copied the Levitts’ costefficient formula.
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In Houses for a New World, the Bryn Mawr professor emerita Barbara Miller Lane investigates the output of
a dozen lesser-known tract house developers in four diverse regions—New England, the mid-Atlantic, the
Midwest, and Southern California—and treats the period’s typical Cape Cods, ranches, and split-levels with
the serious formal analysis once reserved for high-style architecture. Her tour de force of research is all the
more impressive because she has assembled documentation akin to that previously available on the residential
work of important postwar figures such as Richard Neutra, William Wurster, and Marcel Breuer but largely
overlooked for builders other than the Levitts.
Both new books remind us of a time when a popular American middle-class weekend pastime was to pile the
kids and in-laws into the family car and drive around looking at model houses, whether or not you were
actively shopping for a new place. Lane has found newspaper advertisements and promotional materials for
subdivisions that were clearly aimed at wives (who wielded huge influence about housing decisions even
though their husbands were the breadwinners) and stressed the transformational nature of life in these up-tothe-minute dwellings.
World
A revealing example of that appeal to women can be found in a 1955–1957 sales brochure for Cinderella
Estates, a new Anaheim, California, subdivision not far from the recently completed Disneyland. This booklet
depicts a princess-like figure and regal coach next to a rendering of a sprawling ranch-style house and the
words “your every wish for a home…come gloriously true.” The Disneyesque iconography chimes perfectly
with the opening lines of “Young at Heart,” Johnny Richards and Carolyn Leigh’s 1953 hit song for Frank
Sinatra: “Fairy tales can come true/It can happen to you….”
2.
A phenomenon as pervasive as this vast population redistribution could not have gone unnoticed by
commentators in various disciplines, and an extensive literature on the new suburbanization quickly
developed. Critical responses tended to be negative from the outset, typified by such debunking books as the
newspaperman John Keats’s The Crack in the Picture Window (1956) and a dubious pop psychological report
by the physician Richard E. Gordon, his wife Katherine K. Gordon, and the journalist Max Gunther titled The
Split-Level Trap (1960), which claimed that the new suburbs made people physically and mentally ill.
In due course several methodologically sound (and now classic) studies—led by the sociologist Herbert
Gans’s The Levittowners: Ways of Life and Politics in a New Suburban Community (1967) and the urban
historian Kenneth Jackson’s Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (1985)—presented
more nuanced interpretations. So did The Suburban Myth (1969) by the historian (and future literary
biographer) Scott Donaldson, who argued that mass-produced postwar housing had less to do with the malaise
of corporate conformity than the persistence of the Jeffersonian ideal (“the champion American myth of all
time”), which a century and a half earlier established patterns of individual exurban living that worked against
the development of cohesive communities.
Lane attempts to make a case for the architectural virtues of midcentury tract houses, and traces the origins of
their organizational formats to specific parts of the country where they originated before spreading
nationwide. Thus we learn that the once-trendy split-level, which typically combined three strata within a
two-story shell,
a basement level on a slab, containing the garage, a utility enclosure, and sometimes a small “den”; then, half
a level up, the living room and kitchen; then, another half level up, the bedrooms and bath (usually over the
garage)
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emerged in hilly areas where the semisubmerged garage could be dug into a sloping site, and were
particularly suited to the terrain of New Jersey. She also points out that because the interior volumes of the
split-level were stacked, the “footprint” could be half as large as that needed for a single-story ranch, which
saved on land costs.
Yet for all this diligent research, Lane—whose previous work I greatly admire, especially her
pathbreaking Architecture and Politics in Germany, 1918–19451—occasionally makes claims that seem
dubious. She writes that tract house “furniture might be in some sort of neocolonial mode, but much more
often it was spare and light looking, in a style that came to be known as ‘Danish Modern.’” But sleek
Scandinavian-inspired furnishings were an advanced taste throughout the mid-1950s, when most suburban
houses were decorated in a middle-of-the-road manner termed “Transitional.”
More baffling is her assertion that the stereotype of stay-at-home wives in suburbia was baseless. “Women
were not isolated within them,” she says of the new housing developments,
consigned by lack of transportation and lack of work to being dependent “homemakers”: indeed they usually
worked, and, when spouses carpooled or used the train, the wives had the use of the family car.
Yet according to AFL–CIO statistics, as late as 1972 women represented only 38 percent of the American
workforce, and there were unquestionably fewer employment opportunities for women in postwar suburbia
than in cities, except perhaps as schoolteachers, librarians, or supermarket check-out clerks.
Furthermore, Lane minimizes the damage caused by racial segregation, which systematically banned blacks
from buying into new suburban developments for two decades. She writes:
There was a very significant melting-pot experience in the new postwar communities. Italians, Jews,
Catholics, Irish, Polish, and others who had been segregated in American cities and excluded from earlier
American suburbs now mingled freely, forming new kinds of communities that they valued intensely. I think
that this experience may have helped Americans to become more accepting of diversity, even where color
lines were initially maintained. In fact, suburbs became integrated more quickly than cities: by the 1970s,
barriers were broken down nearly everywhere.
However Lane chooses to define segregation, there can be no question that an entire generation of AfricanAmericans was unable to participate in what she sees as a grand social experiment, whereas white immigrants
of many ethnicities had been mingling freely in cities for the better part of a century. As James A. Jacobs
writes in his far more balanced, probing, and insightful history, Detached America, this gross injustice was
committed by the federal government:
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J.R. Eyerman/ Life Picture Collection/Getty Images
Moving day at a new housing development, Los Angeles, 1952
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The FHA did not, as is commonly held, develop racially neutral policies that were then applied in a racist
manner. Rather, FHA policy itself was purposefully written in a way to exclude nonwhite Americans, using
the abstract notion of “market demands” as blanket justification for discrimination in sales. A prejudiced
appraisal system for mortgages passed over existing houses that were believed by officials to pose a risk for
devaluation—those in mixed-race subdivisions, for example, or properties in older urban neighborhoods—
which further reduced access to the financial windfall that became available to white veterans and their
families.
To be sure, many blacks did make it to suburbia, though not easily. By 1960 there were an estimated 2.5
million African-Americans living in suburbs; a decade later, after passage of the Fair Housing Act of 1968,
that number almost doubled, to 4.6 million. But Jacobs observes that blacks moved into older inner-ring
suburbs vacated by cynically manipulated “white flight”:
Such neighborhoods frequently became available for black ownership through blockbusting, a process
structured by the purposeful use of racial anxiety and panic to undermine the residential housing market,
ultimately for the profit of real estate brokers. These agents convinced white residents that they should sell
their properties at below-market values because blacks were beginning to buy in the neighborhood, and their
property values were bound to fall even more. Agents then turned around and sold the properties to black
buyers at inflated prices…[and] departing white families often ended up in a new house on the suburban
periphery.
I witnessed white flight in Camden, New Jersey, which was a thriving blue-collar community when I lived
there from age six to eighteen. By the mid-1960s, the city’s industrial base began to erode and there was a
rapid exodus of whites from the once-prestigious Parkside neighborhood—its tree-shaded streets were lined
with large, handsome Victorian and Edwardian houses—which bigots dubbed “Darkside” when striving
blacks moved in. By the time I brought my new wife to revisit the scenes of my youth in 1978, my parents
and all their friends had long since escaped to the suburbs, and Camden was well on its way to becoming “the
most dangerous city in America,” as one website named it last year.
There were hardly any mid-twentieth-century equivalents of the exemplary Greek Revival house plans that
were widely disseminated through carpenters’ pattern books for many decades after the American
Revolution—the main reason vernacular construction in this country maintained such a high general standard,
even in rural regions, until the Civil War. Instead semimodern forms devised by most 1950s and 1960s
American developers were fundamentally derivative and debased, no matter how evocative they may now
seem of their period. None of the houses documented in the new publications displays the nearly faultless
proportional logic—especially the pleasing relation of the part to the whole—that distinguished even run-ofthe-mill construction by itinerant early-nineteenth-century craftsmen in this country.
Thus the New Urbanists—revisionist planners who since the 1980s have promoted American housing
developments with a stronger sense of community values, which they feel can be fostered by traditional
elements including front porches and sidewalks—have looked not to postwar suburbia but to premodern
prototypes, including pattern book designs. Yet the higher density of dwellings espoused by the New
Urbanists is not in itself a solution, especially since few such enclaves have effectively addressed the
continually vexing place of the automobile in a society slow to pursue more ecologically responsible
transportation options.
Because midcentury tract houses tended to be built very close together (units were usually no more than
twenty-five feet apart), their side elevations were often left as windowless blanks. Another accommodation to
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privacy was the strip window, inserted high on bedroom walls to admit light but prevent neighbors from
looking in. This lack of direct visual connection with the outdoors could recall a jail cell, and although tract
houses were physically proximate, they often felt emotionally isolated.
Another problem with postwar suburban developments was their dull uniformity, determined by lot lines
more than any other factor. Though some builders tried to vary streetscapes by shifting and flipping similar
layouts this way and that, there were limits to what could be achieved in such tightly packed settings. The
major problem was that these designs were insufficiently conceived in all three dimensions. The backs of
even architect-designed houses can sometimes seem like afterthoughts, but the minimally detailed rear
elevations of typical 1950s and 1960s American subdivision schemes were perfunctory in the extreme, and
presented a bleak aspect until landscaping could soften their stark appearance.
Developers focused almost solely on the street façade to make an arresting first impression on prospective
buyers, a quality known in the real estate trade as “curb appeal.” Thus onto the front of these generic boxes
they added an array of more-or-less traditional appliqués—touches of brick or fieldstone to give greater heft
to the predominant asbestos shingles or wood (and occasionally aluminum) siding; nonfunctioning window
shutters; wrought iron railings and Colonial-inspired lighting fixtures; and that ubiquitous symbol of the
postwar suburban home, the picture window. But because such flourishes were typically treated as marketing
devices rather than emanations of an integrated design, detailing tended to have a tacked-on quality that
inadvertently underscored the thin character of mass-produced construction.
There were some notable exceptions to this lack of architectural distinction, particularly on the West Coast,
where the public was more receptive to popularized forms of modern architecture and eagerly embraced the
prevailing new style—updated reinterpretations of the traditional California ranch house. One of its most
vigorous champions was the architect/builder Cliff May (1909–1989), whose flair for self-promotion—
evident in such best-selling books as his Western Ranch Houses2—was equaled by strong design skills that
have made his sprawling, light-filled, well-crafted structures a byword for pleasurable, informal indooroutdoor living and desirable properties on the resale market to this day. The same is true of the developer
Joseph Eichler (1900–1974), whose houses (mostly in the San Francisco Bay Area) were more fully informed
by High Modernism than May’s but now are similarly prized as among the best of their kind.
Interesting though it is to see midcentury tract houses treated with scholarly gravitas, for the most part these
are not designs particularly worthy of preservation or emulation. They paid little attention to sustainability or
energy conservation, were predicated on a highly conventional model of family life that seems outdated if not
oppressive to many Americans today, and few of these structures were so solidly built that they can do
without substantial retrofitting as they enter their sixth or seventh decades. They now seem more important in
sociological rather than architectural terms.
In 1940, only about 40 percent of Americans were homeowners; by 1965 that figure had soared to almost 63
percent. The extraordinary social mobility indicated by these numbers seems all the more poignant when one
considers a reverse development in the United States recently. In 2007–2009, before the full impact of the
Great Recession was felt, 66.4 percent of housing units were owned by their occupants. By 2014 that figure
had dropped to 64.7 percent, the lowest since 1995.
Rather than glamorizing the white-bread world of Eisenhower-era suburbia, I prefer to think of more socially
admirable efforts such as Reston, Virginia, twenty miles west of Washington, D.C., which was founded in
1964 by the developer Robert E. Simon, who died in September at the age of 101. (His initials formed the first
three letters of this start-from-scratch community’s name.) With its sensible and salable mix of housing
formats, including clustered townhouses and high-rise condominiums, and encouragement of businesses that
provided jobs for its residents, Reston more closely resembled European new towns than postwar American
suburbs.
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As Simon’s New York Times obituary noted:
He laid out a town of open spaces, homes and apartments that would be affordable to almost anyone, racially
integrated, economically self-sustaining, pollution-free and rich in cultural and educational opportunities.
That is something to be nostalgic about. You’d have to look very hard in the suburbs today to find a single
builder following his example.
1.
1
Harvard University Press, 1968. ↩
2.
2
Lane Books, 1958. ↩
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/04/21/houses-living-happily-ever-after/
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Offspring for Sumatran rhinos
Date:
April 13, 2016
Source:
Forschungsverbund Berlin e.V. (FVB)
Summary:
A new study examines the decline of the Sumatran rhino in Borneo. It concludes that the remnant
populations of Sumatran rhinos can only be rescued by combining efforts of total protection with
stimulation of breeding activity. The researchers suggest to resettle small isolated populations and to
undertake measures to improve fertility. The case of the recently captured female rhino in
Kalimantan, Borneo shows the importance of immediate action.
FULL STORY
Measures increasing the birth-rate can save the world's smallest rhino from extinction.
Credit: Petra Kretzschmar/IZW
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A new study examines the decline of the Sumatran rhino in Borneo. It concludes that the remnant populations
of Sumatran rhinos can only be rescued by combining efforts of total protection with stimulation of breeding
activity. The researchers suggest to resettle small isolated populations and to undertake measures to improve
fertility. The case of the recently captured female rhino in Kalimantan, Borneo shows the importance of
immediate action. The article has been published in the scientific journal Global Ecology and Conservation.
A consortium of international scientists examined the historical development of the Sumatran rhinos in
Borneo. Their study identified the low reproduction of females in combination with hunting as the main cause
for the current decline of rhinos. "Females do not find a mating partner within the small isolated populations
any more," explains Petra Kretzschmar, scientist at the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research
(IZW), "the long non-reproductive periods lead to the development of reproductive tract tumours." Only a
combination of intensive protection with improvements of the reproductive performance can save the species
from extiction. The researchers recommend resettling populations of less than 15 individuals to highly
protected areas. Here, reproductive health should be monitored on a regular basis and individual female
fertility (conception) should be optimised by using assisted reproduction techniques.
For their study, the scientists compared historical data with recent developments about the Borneo rhino
(Dicerorhinus sumatrensis harrissoni), one of two extant subspecies of the Sumatran rhino. The researchers
used mathematical models to reconstruct the decline of the rhino population in the Tabin Wildlife Reserve
(TWR) in the Malayan state Sabah of Borneo. A study on habitat use completed the picture. Here, the
scientists analysed data collected over a span of 13 years and identified the characteristics describing the
preferred habitat of the rhinos.
Today, only two subspecies of the Sumatran rhino exist, D. s. sumatrensis in Sumatra, Indonesia, and D. s.
harrissoni, in Borneo in the states of Sabah, Malaysia, and Kalimantan, Indonesia. Currently, there are still
around 100 individuals in Sumatra but the Sumatran rhino on Borneo is nearly extinct. The decline of the
rhino population in Sabah has been documented in detail for the first time in this new study. Many animals
were still spotted in 2000. By 2013, the scientists did not register a single rhino individual left. One of the last
Borneo rhinos has been recently captured in the state of Kalimantan, the southern part of Borneo belonging to
Indonesia. "The captured animal was one of the last females of its species" says Kretzschmar of the IZW, "it
died right after capture due to an infection of a snare wound."
The reasons for the catastrophic decline of the Sumatran rhinos have not been previously clear. Data
necessary to improve decisions for conservation management of the rhinos was missing or fragmentary. The
new study closes this gap. It demonstrates that a combination of techniques can do much to illuminate causes
of population declines, improve decision making for conservation management and possibly prevent similar
developments in populations of other species of similar ecological standing.
Story Source:
The above post is reprinted from materials provided byForschungsverbund Berlin e.V. (FVB). Note:
Materials may be edited for content and length.
Journal Reference:
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1.
Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
P. Kretzschmar, S. Kramer-Schadt, L. Ambu, J. Bender, T. Bohm, M. Ernsing, F. Göritz, R. Hermes, J.
Payne, N. Schaffer, S.T. Thayaparan, Z.Z. Zainal, T.B. Hildebrandt, H. Hofer. The catastrophic decline of the
Sumatran rhino (Dicerorhinus sumatrensis harrissoni) in Sabah: Historic exploitation, reduced female
reproductive performance and population viability. Global Ecology and Conservation, 2016; 6: 257
DOI: 10.1016/j.gecco.2016.02.006
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/04/160413084730.htm
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The Steady Rise of Renting
The Great Housing Reset marches on, especially in superstar cities and prominent tech hubs.

RICHARD FLORIDA

@Richard_Florida
Keith Srakocic / AP Images
Writing in the wake of the great financial crisis of 2008, I argued that the ultimate impact of the crash would
be a “Great Reset,” as the U.S. gradually shifted away from its decades-long obsession with suburban
homeownership and toward a greater role for renting in cities and urban areas.
Now, a recent report from the real estate website Trulia provides substantial evidence of this Great Reset from
owning to renting. The report examines growth in renting versus owning across the U.S., as well as the rise in
rental housing prices and the growing housing burdens faced by renters between 2006 (two years prior to the
economic crisis) and 2014. To get at this, the report uses data from the American Community Survey for 50
of the largest U.S. metros. My MPI colleague Charlotta Mellander then went back to ACS and extracted data
on the share of households that are renters versus owners and ran a correlation analysis of the key economic,
demographic, and social factors that bear on them.
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The shift from owning to renting
Trulia
As the chart above shows, the share of U.S. households that rent increased from 36.1 percent in 2006 to 41.1
percent in 2014. Meanwhile, the share of households who own their own homes declined over that same
period. The share of renters increased in each and every one of the 50 U.S. metros Trulia examined.
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Trulia
The increase in renting was most notable among millennials. The share of renters between the ages of 18 and
34 jumped from 62.5 percent in 2006 to 71.6 percent in 2014. This increase in renting was even larger among
Americans between the ages of 26 and 34, rising by a whopping 10.9 percentage points between 2006 to
2014, compared to 5.9 percentage points for the younger group. As the report notes:
Traditionally, young adults have become first-time homebuyers as they grow older and have [advanced] in
their careers and incomes. This suggests that the fundamental shifts in the economy (job loss, low-income
growth, diminishing affordability of homes) may have caused the increase in renting for those in the 18-34
year-old group.
But renting was up among all age groups, as the chart above shows. The share of renters increased from 33 to
40.7 percent among households ages 35-54. Trulia speculates that this group may have been hard hit by job
loss and foreclosure during the crisis. Renting also increased, from 24.4 to 27 percent, among Americans aged
55 and older.
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Trulia
The shift from homeownership to renting was actually more pronounced among middle-class and more
affluent Americans, according to the report. Among the lowest income households, those making $31,000 or
less, the share of renters grew by 3.7 percentage points, from 61.1 to 64.8 percent. For lower middle-class
Americans (households earning between $31,000 and $42,000), the share of renters increased by 4.9
percentage points, from 43.8 to 48.7 percent.
The largest increase was among upper-middle class households (households earning between $126,000 to
$188,000), who saw their share of renters grow by 6.3 percentage points, from 27.2 to 33.5 percent. For the
highest income households, those making more than $188,000, the share increased by 5 percentage points,
from 12.3 to 17.3 percent. (Keep in mind that these income ranges apply to households with an average of
three residents, and that data will vary by year and the size of a household.)
A much larger share of black and Hispanic American households were renters over this time period. As of
2014, 66.1 percent of Hispanics and 61 percent of African Americans were renters, compared to just 34.4
percent of whites. While all racial groups saw a shift from owning to renting between 2006 and 2014,
Hispanics experienced the largest rise—an 8.7 percentage point increase (from 57.4 to 66.1 percent)—
compared to a 5 percentage point increase (from 56 to 61 percent) among black households and a similar
increase (from 29.5 to 34.4 percent) among white households.
The transition overall is led by large, dense, superstar cities like New York and L.A., as well as knowledge
and tech hubs like Boston, Seattle, Austin, and San Francisco and Silicon Valley in the Bay Area, among
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others. These metros have some of the largest shares of renters compared to homeowners. In fact, there are
three metros where more than half of households rent: New York, L.A., and San Francisco.
Metros with the Largest and Smallest Shares of Renters, 2014
Top Ten Metros
Largest Share of Renters
New York, NY
56.9%
Los Angeles, CA
54.4%
San Francisco, CA
53.7%
Las Vegas, NV
49.4%
San Diego, CA
47.7%
Miami, FL
47.2%
San Jose, CA
43.7%
Oakland, CA
43.2%
Austin, TX
42.9%
Orange County, CA
42.5%
Bottom Ten Metros
Smallest Share of Renters
Long Island, NY
20.5%
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Warren, MI
27.8%
Minneapolis-St. Paul, MN
30.0%
Pittsburgh, PA
30.9%
St. Louis, MO
31.3%
West Palm Beach, FL
32.6%
Hartford, CT
33.3%
Buffalo, NY
33.5%
Baltimore, MD
34.6%
Cincinnati, OH
34.9%
The knowledge and tech hubs of San Diego, San Jose, Oakland, Austin, Boston, and Seattle all rank among
the top 15 U.S. metros with the largest share of renters. A number of service- and tourism-based metros like
Las Vegas and Miami also rank high up the list. It’s no small coincidence that these places were obliterated
by foreclosures during the financial crisis. On the flip side, older industrial metros such as Pittsburgh, Buffalo,
St. Louis, Cincinnati, and Baltimore rank among the metros with the lowest shares of renters, with less than
35 percent.
Where the rent is too damn high
The table below shows the ten large U.S. metros where rents grew the most compared to those where rents
grew the least between 2006-2014. This time, knowledge and tech hubs like San Jose in the heart of Silicon
Valley, Washington, D.C., Seattle, San Francisco, Denver, Austin, and Portland, Oregon, top the list. New
York, San Antonio, and Charlotte round out the top ten.
Even though it experienced a surge in renters, Las Vegas saw the smallest increase in rent from 2006-2014.
This can presumably be explained by the fact that the housing crisis turned many single-family homes into
rentals. The same is true for Detroit, which comes in second to last with a 6.4 percent increase in rent. The
rest of the bottom ten consists mainly of a mix of service- or tourist-based metros such as Orlando and West
Palm Beach and Midwest metros like Cleveland and Cincinnati.
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Metros with the Largest and Smallest Rent Increases, 2006-2014
Top Ten Metros
Largest Increase in Rent
San Jose, CA
42.6%
Washington, D.C.
38.9%
Seattle, WA
38.3%
San Francisco, CA
33.7%
Denver, CO
32.0%
Austin, TX
31.8%
Portland, OR
31.8%
New York, NY
31.3%
San Antonio, TX
29.2%
Charlotte, NC
28.8%
Bottom Ten Metros
Smallest Increase in Rent
Las Vegas, NV
3.8%
Detroit, MI
6.4%
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West Palm Beach, FL
7.2%
Providence, RI
10.1%
Orlando, FL
11.4%
Sacramento, CA
11.9%
Cleveland, OH
12.3%
Riverside-San Bernardino, CA
14.9%
Atlanta, GA
15.8%
Cincinnati, OH
15.9%
Where rent burdens hit the hardest
At the end of the day, housing affordability is made up of two things: the cost of rent and the income and
wages people use to pay for it. In the aftermath of the economic crisis, renters have been caught in a
devastating bind as rents have risen while incomes decline. Average rents increased by 22.3 percent between
2006 to 2014, while average incomes declined by 5.8 percent.
The housing cost squeeze faced by the poorest households is deeply disturbing. The share of income devoted
to rent by the lowest income households increased from an already whopping 55.7 percent to a staggering
62.5 percent. No other income group spends more than 30 percent of their income on rent. Lower middleclass households saw their rent burdens grow from 27.4 percent to 30 percent. Upper middle-class households
went from 18.5 percent to 20 percent, and the richest households from 12.5 percent to 13.5 percent.
Increasing rent burdens hit hardest at Hispanic households, where rent burdens grew from 32.1 to 35.1
percent, compared to smaller increases for black households (from 33 to 34.6 percent) and white
households (from 28.3 to 29.1 percent).
Rent burdens also vary across metros. Renters in 40 out of 50 U.S. metros were spending a greater portion of
their income on rent in 2014 than they were in 2006. The table below looks at the metros with the highest and
lowest percentage of their income spent on rent for 2014.
Metros with the Highest and Lowest Shares of Income Spent on Rent, 2014
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Top Ten Metros
Highest Share of Income Spent on Rent
Miami, FL
39.9%
Detroit, MI
35.4%
Los Angeles, CA
35.3%
Fort Lauderdale, FL
35.2%
Riverside-San Bernardino, CA
35.1%
West Palm Beach, FL
34.3%
Long Island, NY
34.0%
Orange County, CA
33.9%
Orlando, FL
32.8%
Sacramento, CA
32.6%
Bottom Ten Metros
Lowest Share of Income Spent on Rent
Pittsburgh, PA
26.2%
San Francisco, CA
27.3%
Minneapolis-St. Paul, MN
27.8%
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Warren, MI
27.8%
Columbus, OH
28.1%
Seattle, WA
28.2%
Houston, TX
28.2%
Charlotte, NC
28.2%
Cincinnati, OH
28.3%
San Antonio, TX
28.5%
Here we see an interesting pattern. Aside from L.A., the places with the highest rent burdens are Sunbelt
tourist and service-oriented metros like Miami and Orlando or hard-hit Rustbelt metros like Detroit, where
incomes are already low.
Meanwhile, the bottom ten includes a combination of Midwest metros like Pittsburgh and Cincinnati,
alongside the energy hub of Houston, and tech hubs like San Francisco and Seattle. New York ranks 15th
(with 31.5 percent), while knowledge hubs like Boston and Austin are situated near the middle, with around
30 percent.
In a previous analysis, Mellander and I found that housing burdens in tech hubs fell disproportionately on
service and blue collar workers, while knowledge and creative class workers made more than enough to cover
housing.
All of this shapes an uncomfortable pattern where rents are higher in leading superstar cities and tech hubs
like San Jose and Seattle, but rent burdens—or rent as a portion of one’s overall income—are worse in tourist,
resort, and service metros like Miami, West Palm Beach, and Las Vegas, as well as hard-hit Rustbelt metros
like Detroit.
The ongoing Great Reset
Homeownership is no longer the key driver of America’s industrial economy. Across the U.S., cities and
metros with higher rates of homeownership have had more trouble adjusting to the demands of the knowledge
economy, trapping their residents in housing they cannot sell and limiting their ability to adjust to economic
downturns. Meanwhile, cities and metros with more renters have proven better able to cope with the
transformation from an industrial to a knowledge economy.
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In fact, metros with greater shares of renters have higher wages, higher productivity (measured as economic
output per capita), and greater concentrations of high-tech firms, according to Mellander’s basic correlation
analysis. Metros with greater shares of renters also have higher concentrations of highly educated adults with
college degrees and a greater share of the workforce made up of creative class workers in science and
technology, knowledge-based professions, and arts, culture, entertainment, and media. Metros with greater
shares of renters are also substantially denser and more diverse—two other factors that contribute to
innovation, creativity, and economic growth.
On the flip side, metros with higher levels of homeownership are less innovative, less productive, less diverse
on average, and have less talent. These associations are even more pronounced when we look at just the 51
large metros with more than one million people.
Cities and metros with higher rates of homeownership have had more trouble adjusting to the demands of the
knowledge economy.
In other words, Great Resets do not occur all at once, but gradually over many decades. While suburbia fit the
needs of the old industrial economy by stoking demand for products coming out of its factories and industrial
assembly lines, that system ultimately became dysfunctional, contributing directly to the crisis. The current
Great Reset from owning to renting is occurring not only because many people prefer urban-style living, but
because more flexible rental housing in denser areas is more in sync with the knowledge economy.
The most innovative, productive, and flexible metros have roughly 50 to 55 percent of households who rent.
Over the course of the Reset, I predict that the share of renters is likely to increase nationwide to around 45
percent, as the share of homeowners declines to perhaps 55 percent.
All of this begs for a change in America’s housing policies. Currently, many policies incentivize
homeownership and the construction of wasteful, energy inefficient, sprawling suburbs in addition to
conferring large subsidies on relatively wealthier homeowners. In the future, they should become more
neutral with regard to multifamily rentals versus single-family homeownership, while conferring subsidies on
low-income renters who bear the largest housing cost burdens.
http://www.citylab.com/housing/2016/02/the-rise-of-renting-in-theus/462948/?utm_source=nl__link3_021716
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Fast food may expose consumers to harmful chemicals called phthalates
April 13, 2016
Source:
George Washington University Milken Institute School of Public Health
Summary:
People who reported consuming more fast food in a national survey were exposed to higher levels of
potentially harmful chemicals known as phthalates, according to a new study.
FULL STORY
Fast food may expose consumers to harmful chemicals called phthalates, say researchers.
Credit: © cook_inspire / Fotolia
People who reported consuming more fast food in a national survey were exposed to higher levels of
potentially harmful chemicals known as phthalates, according to a study published by researchers at Milken
Institute School of Public Health (Milken Institute SPH) at the George Washington University. The study, one
of the first to look at fast-food consumption and exposure to these chemicals, appears in the
journal Environmental Health Perspectives.
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"People who ate the most fast food had phthalate levels that were as much as 40 percent higher," says lead
author Ami Zota, ScD, MS, an assistant professor of environmental and occupational health at Milken
Institute SPH. "Our findings raise concerns because phthalates have been linked to a number of serious health
problems in children and adults."
Phthalates belong to a class of industrial chemicals used to make food packaging materials, tubing for dairy
products, and other items used in the production of fast food. Other research suggests these chemicals can
leach out of plastic food packaging and can contaminate highly processed food.
Zota and her colleagues looked at data on 8,877 participants who had answered detailed questions about their
diet in the past 24 hours, including consumption of fast food. These participants also had provided researchers
with a urinary sample that could be tested for the breakdown products of two specific phthalates--DEHP and
DiNP.
Zota and her colleagues found that the more fast food participants in the study ate the higher the exposure to
phthalates. People in the study with the highest consumption of fast food had 23.8 percent higher levels of the
breakdown product for DEHP in their urine sample. And those same fast food lovers had nearly 40 percent
higher levels of DiNP metabolites in their urine compared to people who reported no fast food in the 24 hours
prior to the testing.
The researchers also discovered that grain and meat items were the most significant contributors to phthalate
exposure. Zota says the grain category contained a wide variety of items including bread, cake, pizza,
burritos, rice dishes and noodles. She also notes that other studies have also identified grains as an important
source of exposure to these potentially harmful chemicals.
In addition, the researchers also looked for exposure to another chemical found in plastic food packaging-Bisphenol A or BPA. Researchers also believe exposure to BPA can lead to health and behavior problems,
especially for young children. This study found no association between total fast food intake and BPA.
However, Zota and her colleagues found that people who ate fast food meat products had higher levels of
BPA than people who reported no fast food consumption.
This study fits into a bigger field of ongoing research showing that phthalates are in a wide variety of personal
products, toys, perfume and even food. In 2008 Congress banned the use of phthalates in the production of
children's toys because of concerns about the health impact of these chemicals.
But Zota notes that DEHP and DiNP are two phthalates still in use despite concerns that they leach out of
products and get into the human body. Studies of the health impact of exposure to these chemicals have
suggested they can damage the reproductive system and they may lead to infertility.
Large studies that might conclusively link phthalates in fast food and health problems could take years to
conduct. In the meantime, Zota offers some common sense advice. She notes that frequent consumption of
fast food is not recommended because such foods contain higher amounts of fat, salt and calories. "People
concerned about this issue can't go wrong by eating more fruits and vegetables and less fast food," Zota
suggests. "A diet filled with whole foods offers a variety of health benefits that go far beyond the question of
phthalates."
Story Source:
The above post is reprinted from materials provided by George Washington University Milken Institute
School of Public Health. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.
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Journal Reference:
1.
Susanna D. Mitro, Cassandra A. Phillips, Ami R. Zota. Recent Fast Food Consumption and Bisphenol A and
Phthalates Exposures among the U.S. Population in NHANES, 2003–2010. Environmental Health
Perspectives, 2016; DOI: 10.1289/ehp.1510803
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/04/160413083833.htm
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Amid the Horrors of Boko Haram, These Women Yearn for Romance
A photojournalist goes behind the scenes in a land of Islamic terror.
Text by Samantha Michaels; Photos by Glenna Gordon
| Fri Feb. 12, 2016 1:54 PM EST
The open markets of northern Nigeria are known for their bombings. This conservative Islamic region is
where the militant group Boko Haram laid the groundwork for a caliphate, which included kidnapping
schoolgirls and sending suicide bombers into commercial centers. (Just this week, the group
dispatched bomb-laden women to a camp for women and children fleeing its violence, killing 58 people.) In
2012, when photojournalist Glenna Gordonfirst visited Kano, a city hit by some of the violence, she expected
to encounter stories of fear and tragedy. What she didn't expect was the love stories.
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Hadiza Sani Garba writes her novels longhand in small composition books.
Kano's markets, Gordon discovered, do a brisk commerce in local romance novels, scribbled by hand before
being digitally transcribed, bulk printed, and sold for a couple of dollars each. Part of the Hausa tradition
of littattafan soyayya, or love literature, the books are penned by devout Muslim women who live in walledoff compounds yet brave the Islamic censors and morality police to get their work published. With titles
like Sin Is a Puppy That Follows You Home, some of the books push cultural boundaries—railing against
child marriage, for instance—while others enforce them, with tips to satisfy husbands. All told, as Gordon
documents in her new photo book, Diagram of the Heart, they offer a complicated glimpse of what it means to
be a Muslim woman grappling with romance, religion, and loss in a chaotic region.
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Love literature at the market in Kano, northern Nigeria.
Before Gordon arrived in northern Nigeria, she told me, "I was afraid of everything." That is, until she
jumped into a beat-up taxicab with one of the novelists, Rabi Talle, and her sisters—"a band of loud laughing
women dressed up to the nines" for a wedding party. "What I learned," she said, "was that there's opportunity
within constraint." Despite cultural restrictions, the women were writing these books, posting on Facebook,
and wearing bright makeup. Perhaps most radically, they were earning their own livings. Talle boldly
includes contact information in her novels—her multiple cellphones ring constantly with women seeking
advice.
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Farida Ado, 27, is one of a small contingent of Muslim romance authors in increasingly fundamentalist
northern Nigeria.
Gordon's photos capture intimate moments: a novelist bringing sweet fruit to a lover, a woman settling a
family dispute with the morality police, a young bride crying beneath her veil. "I want this to show us places
that we don't know, people that are hard for us to imagine, and women who have a degree of autonomy and
professional success within a system that is hard for us to accept," Gordon said. It's easy to base assumptions
on acts of extremism. But "there's so much more. There's this beautiful, fascinating world out there, where
women write books and little girls read them."
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Novelist Rabi Tale with one of her suitors. She was engaged once, but the man's family didn't approve of her
writing.
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A bride-to-be prepares for her wedding. (Many of the books are about love and marriage.)
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A
bride at an Islamic wedding in Kano stands away from the men—male and female guests seldom mix.
A
young wedding guest.
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A novel rests on a bedside table.
Sani,
a taxi driver, with one of his wives. His eight children are visible in the lacquered photograph.
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"If a man offers you flowers, money, or meat, always choose meat," Tale told photojournalist Gordon.
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A woman traveling by train reads a Hausa romance novel using her cellphone flashlight.
All photos by Glenna Gordon, from Diagram of the Heart (Red Hook Editions, 2016).
http://www.motherjones.com/media/2016/02/diagram-of-heart-glenna-gordon-boko-haram-nigeria-loveromance
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A Mouzell for Melastomus (1617)
Rachel Speght
Note on the e-text: this Renascence Editions text is that of the edition of 1617, from a copy in the collection of
the Harvard College Library. The transcription was done by Shirley Marc, Center for the Study of Women in
Society, University of Oregon. This edition is in the public domain. Content unique to this presentation is
copyright © 1998 The University of Oregon. For nonprofit and educational uses only.
A
MOVZELL FOR
MELASTOMVS,
The Cynicall Bayter of, and foule
mouthed Barker against
EVAHS SEX.
________________________________________
Or an Apologeticall Answere to
that Irreligious and Illiterate
pamphlet made by Io. Sw. and by him
Intituled, The Arraignment
of Women.
________________________________________
By Rachel Speght.
________________________________________
P R O V E R B 26.5
A[n]swer a foole according to his foolishness, lest he be wise in
his owne conceit.
________________________________________
LONDON.
Printed by Nicholas Okes for Thomas Archer, and
are to be sold at his shop in Popeshead Pallace. 1617.
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To all vertuous Ladies Honourable or Worshipfull, and to all other
of Heuahs sex fearing God, and louing their
iust reputation, grace and peace through
Christ, to eternall glory.
T was the simile of that wise and learned Lactantius, that if fire, though but with a small
sparke kindled, bee not at the first quenched, it may worke great mischiefe and dammage:
So likewise may the scandals and defamations of the malevolent in time proue pernitious,
if they bee not nipt in the head at their first appearance. The consideration of this (right
Honourable and Worshipfull Ladies) hath incited me. (though yong, and the vnworthiest of
thousands) to encounter with a furious enemy to our sexe, least if his vniust imputations
should continue without answere, he might insult and account himselfe a victor; and by
such a conceit deale, as Historiographers report the vpier to doe, who in the Winter time doth vomit forth her
poyson, and in the spring time sucketh the same vp againe, which becommeth twise as deadly as the former:
And this our pestiferous enemy, by thinking to prouide a more deadly poyson for women, then already he
hath foamed forth, may euaporate, by an addition vnto his former illeterate Pamphlet (intituled The
Arraignement of Women) a more contagious obtrectation then he hath already done, and indeed hath
threatned to doe. Secondly, if it should haue had free passage without any answere at all (seeing
that Tacere is, quasi consentire) the vulgar ignorant might haue beleeued his Diabolicall infamies to be
infallible truths, not to bee infringed; whereas now they may plainely perceiue them to bee but the scumme of
Heathenish braines, or a building raised without a foundation (at least from sacred Scripture) which the winde
of Gods truth must needs cast downe to the ground. A third reason why I haue aduentured to fling this stone at
vaunting Goliah is, to comfort the mindes of all Heuahs sex, both rich and poore, learned and vnlearned, with
this Antidote, that if the feare of God reside in their hearts, maugre all aduersaries, they are highly esteemed
and accounted of in the eies of their gracious Redeemer, so that they need not feare the darts of enuy or
obtrectators: For shame and disgrace (saith Aristotle) is the end of them that shoote such poysoned shafts.
Worthy therefore of imitation is that example of Senec[a], who when he was told that a certaine man did
exclaime and raile against him, made this milde answere; Some dogs barke more vpon custome than
curstnesse; and some speake euill of others, not that the defamed deserue it, but because through custome and
corruption of their hearts they cannot speake well of any. This I alleage as a paradigmatical patterne for all
women, noble & ignoble to follow, that they be not enflamed with choler against this our enraged aduersarie,
but patiently consider of him according to the portraiture which he hath drawne of himselfe, his Writings
being the very embleme of a monster.
This my briefe Apologie (Right Honourable and Worshipfull) did I enterprise, not as thinking my selfe
more fit then others to vndertake such a taske, but as one, who not perceiuing any of our Sex to enter the Lists
of encountring with this our grand enemy among men, I being out of all feare, because armed with the truth,
which though often blamed, yet can neuer be shamed, and the Word of Gods Spirit, together with the example
of vertues Pupils for a Buckler, did no whit dread to combate with our said maleuolent aduersarie. And if in
so doing I shall bee censured by the iudicious to haue the victorie, and shall have giuen content vnto the
wronged, I haue both hit the marke whereat I aymed, and obtained that prize which I desired. But
if Zoilusshall adiudge me presumptuous in Dedicating this my Chirograph vnto personages of so high ranke;
both because of my insufficiency in literature and tendernesse in yeares: I this Apologize for my selfe; that
feeling the Bayter of Women hathopened his mouth against noble as well as ignoble; against the rich as well
as the poore; therefore meete it is that they should be ioynt spectators of this encounter: And withall in regard
of my imperfection both in learning and age, I need so much the more to impetrate patronage from some of
power to sheild mee from the biting wrongs of Momus, who ofententimes setteth a rankling tooth into the
sides of truth. Wherefore I being of Dictus his mind, who deemed himselfe safe vnder the shield
of Cæsar, haue presumed to shelter my selfe vnder the wings of you (Honourable personages) against the
persecuting heate of this fierie and furious Dragon; desiring that you would be pleased, not to looke so
much ad opus, as ad animum: And so not doubting of the fauourable acceptance and censure of all vertuously
affected, I rest
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Your Honours and worships
Humbly at commandement,
Rachel Speght.
I f Reason had but curb'd thy witlesse will,
O r feare of God restrain'd thy rauing quill,
S uch venome fowle thou would'st base blight to spue:
E xcept that Grace haue bidden thee adue:
P rowesse disdaines to wrastle with the weake,
H eatheish affected, care not what they speake.
S educer of the vulgar sort of men,
W as Sathan crept into thy filthie Pen,
E nflaming thee with such infernall smoake,
T hat (if thou had'st thy will) should women choake?
N efarious fiends thy sence hauing deluded,
A nd from thee all humanitie excluded
M onster of men , worthie no other name
For that thou did'st assay our Sex to shame.
RA. SP.
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Faults escaped in this impression.
Page 1. lin. 13. in the Preface for rearingreade fearing.
page 4. line 17. for Ironica reade Ironia.
page 7. line 19. for not touche reade not to touch.
page 11 line 20. for Meriam reade miriam.
page 21. line 13. for tongs reade tongues.
page 32. line 17.for adulterous reade idolatrous.
page 33. line 30.for Arganex reade Organon.
Not vnto the veriest Ideot that
Euer set Pen to Paper, but to the
Cynicall Bayter of Women, or,
metamorphosed Milogunca,
Ioseph Swetnam.
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Rom standing water, which soon putrifies, can no good fish be expected, for it produceth
no other creatures but those that are venemous or noisome, as snakes, adders, and such like.
Semblably, no better streame can we looke, should issue from your idle corrupt braine,
then that whereto the ruffe of your fury (to vse your owne words) hath moued you to open
the slaite. In which excremene of your roaring cogitations you haue vsed such irregularities
touching concordance, and obserued so disoredered a methode, as I doubt not to rely on,
that a very Accidence Schollar would haue quite put you downe in both. You appeare
herein not vnlike that Painter, who seriously indeuouring topourtray Cupids Bowe forgot the String: for you,
beeing greedie to botch vp your mingle mangle inuectiue against Women; haue not therein obserued, in many
places, so much [as] Gramm[a]r sense. But the emptiest Barrell makes the lowdest sound; and so we will
account of you.
Many propositions haue you framed, which (as you thinke) make much against Women, but if one would
make a Logicall assumption, the conclusion would be flat against your owne Sex. Your dealing wants so
much discretion, that I doubt whether to bestow so good a name as the Dunce vpon you: but Minoricy bids me
keepe within my bounds; and therefore I onlie say vnto you, that your corrupt Heart and railing To[n]gue,
hath made you a fit scribe for the Diuell.
In that you haue termed your virulent foame, the Beare-bayting of Women,you haue plainely displayed
you[r] owne disposition to be Cynicall, in that there appeares no other Dogge or Bull, to bayte them, but your
selfe. Good had it beene for you to haue put on that Muzzell, which Saint Lance would haue all Christians to
weare; Speake not euill one of another: and then had you not seemed so like the
Serpent Porphirus, as now you doo, which, though full of deadly poyson, yet being
toothlesse, hurteth none so much as himselfe. For you hauing gone beyond the limits not
of Humanitie alone, butof Christianitie, haue done greater harme vnto your owne soule, then vnto women, as
may plainely appeare. First, in dishonoring of God by palpable blasphemy, wresting and peruerting euerie
place of Scripture, that you haue alleadged; which by the testimony of Saint Peter,
Iames 4.11.
is to the destruction of them that so doe. Secondly, it appeares by your disparaging of, and
opprobrious speeches against that excellent worke of Gods hands, which in his great loue he
perfected for the comfort of man. Thirdly, and lastly, by this your hodge-podge of
heathenish Sentences, Similies, and Examples, you haue set forth your selfe in your right colours, vnto the
view of the world: and I doubt not but the Iudicious will account of you according to your demerit: As for the
Vulgar sort, which haue no more learning then you haue shewed in your Booke, it is likely they will applaud
you for your paines.
As for your Bugge-beare or aduice vnto Women, that whatsoeuer they doe thinke of your Worke, they
should conceale it, lest in finding fault, they bewray their galled backes to the world, in which you allude to
that Prouerbe, Rubbe a galled horse, and he will kicke: Vnto it I answere by way of Apologie, that though
everie galled horse, being touched, doth kicke; yet euery one that kickes, is not galled: so that you might as
well haue said, that because burnt folks dread the fire, therfore none feare fire but those that are burnt, as
made that illiterate conclusion which you haue absurdly inferred.
In your Title Leafe, you arraigne none but lewd, idle, froward and vnconstant women, but in the Sequele
(through defect of memorie as it seemeth) forgetting that you had made a distinction of good from badde,
condemning all in generall, you aduise men to beware of, and not to match with any of these sixe sorts of
women, viz. Good and Badde, Faire and Foule, Richand Poore: But this doctrine of Diuells
Saint Paul foreseeing would be broached in the latter
Pet. 3.16.
times, giues warning of.
There also you promise a Commendation of wise, vertuous, and honest women, when as
in the subsequent, the worst words, and filthiest Epithites that you can deuise, you bestow on
them in generall, excepting no sort of Women. Heerein may you be likened vnto a man, which vpon the doore
of a scuruie house sets this Superscription, Heere is a very faire house to be let:whereas the doore being
opened, it is no better then a dogge-hole and darke dungeon.
1.Tim.4.3
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Further, if your owne words be true, that you wrote with your hand, but not with your heart, then you are
an hypocrite in Print: but it is rather to be thought that your Pen was the bewrayer of the abundance of your
minde, and that this was but a little morter to dawbe vp agayne the wall, which you intended to breake
downe.
The reuenge of your rayling Worke wee leaue to Him, who hath appropriated vengeance vnto himselfe,
whose Pen-man hath included Raylers in the Catalogue of them that shall not inherite Gods Kingdome, and
your selfe vnto the mercie of that iust Iudge, who is able to saue and to destroy.
Your vndeserued friend,
R A C H E L S P E G H T.
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In praise of the Author and her Worke.
I
F littleDauid that for Israels sake,
esteemed neyther life nor limbe too deare,
In that he did aduenture without dread,
to cast at him, whom all the hoste did feare,
A stone, which brought Goliah to the ground,
Obtain'd applause with Songs and Timbrels sound.
Then let another young encombatant
receiue applause, and thanks, as well as hee:
For with an enemie to Women kinde,
she hath encountred, as each wight may see:
And with the fruit of her industrious toyle,
To this Goliah she hath giuen the foyle.
Admire her much I may, both for her age,
and this her Mouzell for a blacke-mouth'd wight,
But praise her, and her worke, to that desert,
which vnto them belongs of equall right
I cannot; onely this I say, and end,
Shee is vnto her Sex a faithfull friend.
P H I L A L E T H E S.
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I
F he that for his Countrie doth expose
himselfe vnto the furie of his foe,
Doth merite praise and due respect of those,
for whom he did that perill vndergoe:
Then let the Author of this Mouzell true
Receiue the like, of right it is her due.
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For she to shield her Sex from Slaunders Dart,
and from inuectiue obtrectation,
Hath ventured by force of Learnings Art,
(in which she hath had eductation)
To combate with him, which doth shame his Sex,
By offring feeble women to perplex.
P H I L O M A T H E S.
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P
Raise is a debt, which doth of due belong
To those, that take the path ov Vertues trace,
Meating their wayes and workes by Reasons rule,
Hauing their hearts so lightned with Gods grace,
That wi[ll]ingly they would not him offend,
But holily their Lives beginne and end.
Of such a Pupil vnto Pietie
As is describ'd, I doe intend to speake,
A Virgin young, and of such tender age,
As for encounter may be deemd too weake.
Shee hauing not as yet seene twenty yeares,
Though in her carriage older she appeares.
Her wit and learning in this present Worke,
More praise doth merit, then my quill can write:
Her magnanimitie deserues applaud,
In vetring with a fierie foe to fight:
And now in fine, what shall I further say?
But that she beares the triumph quite away.
F A V O V R B.
A Mouzell for Melastomus the
Cynicall Bayter of, and foulemouthed Barker against
E V A H S Sex.
P R O V E R B S 18. 22.
He that findeth wife, findeth a good thing, and
receiueth fauour of the Lord.
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F lawfull it bee to compare the Potter with his Clay, or theArchitect with the Edifice, then
may I, in some sort, resemble that loue of God towards man, in creating woman, vnto the
affectionate care of Abraham for his sonne Isaac, who that hee might not take to wife one
of the daughters of the Canaanites,did prouide him one of his owne kindred.
Almighty God, who is rich in mercie, hauing made all things of
Gen.24.4
nothing, and created man in his owne image: that is, (as the Apostle
expounds it) In wisedome, righteousnesse and true holinesse, making him Lord ouer all: to Ephe.2.4
auoide that solitarie condition that hee was then in, hauing none to commerce or conuerse
withall but dumbe creatures, it seemed good vnto the Lord, that as of euery creature hee had
Col.5.50.
made male and female, and man onely being alone without mate, so likewise to forme an
helpe meete for him. Adam for this cause being cast into a heauy sleepe, God extracting a rib
from his side, thereof made, or built, Woman; shewing thereby, that man was as an vnperfect Gen.2.10.
building afore woman was made, and bringing her vnto Adam, vnited and married them
together.
Thus the resplendent loue of God toward man appeared, in taking care to prouide him an helper before hee
saw his owne want, and in prouiding him such an helper as should bee meete for him. Soueraignety had hee
ouer all creatures, and they were all seruiceable vnto
him, but yet afore woman was formed, there was not a meete helpe found for Adam. Mans
worthinesse not meriting this great fauour at Gods hands, but his mercie onely mouing him
therevnto: I may vse those words which the Iewesvttered whn they saw Christ weepe
John 11 36.
for Lazarus, Behold how hee loued him:Behold, and that with good regard, Gods loue; yea
his great loue, which from the beginning hee hath borne vnto man: which, as it appeares in
all things; so next, his loue in Christ Iesus apparantly in this; that for mans sake, that hee might not be an
vnite, when all other creatures were for procreation duall, hee created woman to bee a
Gen. 2.20
1.Cor.11.9.
solace vnto him, to participate of his sorrowes, partake of his pleasures, and as a good
yokefellow beare part of his burthen. Of the excellencie of this Structure, I meane of
Women, whose foundation and original of creation, was Gods loue, do I intend to dilate.
________________________________________
Of Womans Excellency, with the causes of her
creation, and of the sympathie which ought to
be in man and wife each toward other.
T
HE worke of Creation being finished, this approbation thereof was giuen by God himselfe, That All was
very good: If All, then Woman, who, excepting man, is the most excellent
Gen.1.31.
1 Obiect.
2 Obiect.
1.Tim.2.14.
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creature vnder the Canopie of heauen. But if it be obiected by any.
First, that woman, though created good, yet by giuing eare to Sathans temptation,
brought death & misery vpon all her posterity.
1.Cor.7.1.
Secondly, That Adam was not deceived, but that the woman was deceiued, and was in
the transgression.
4 Obiect.
Thirdly, that Saint Paul saith, It were good for a man not to touch a woman.
Fourthly, and lastly, that of Salomon, who seemes to speake against all of our sex; I haue
Eccles.7.30.
found one man of a thousand, but a woman among them all haue I not found, whereof in
it[s] due place.
To the first of these obiections I answere, that Sathan first assailed the woman, because
1 Obiect.
where the hedge is lowest, most easie it is to get ouer, and she being the weaker vessell was
answered.
with more facility to be seduced: Like as a Cristall glasse sooner receiues a cracke then a
strong stone pot. Yet we shall finde the offence of Adam and Eue almost to paralell: For as
an ambitious desire of being made like vnto God, was the motiue which caused her to eate, so likewise was it
his; as may plainely appeare by thatIroni[a],
3 Obiect.
Behold, man is become as one of vs: Not that hee was so indeed; but heereby his desire to
attaine a greater perfection than God had giuen him, was reproued. Woman sinned, it is true,
by her infidelitie in not beleeuing the Word of God, but giuing credite to Sathans faire
Gen 3.4.
promises, that shee should not die; but so did the man too: And if Adam had not approoued
of that deed which Eue had done, and beene willing to treade the steps which she had gone,
hee being her Head would haue reproued her, and haue made the commandement a bit to restraine him from
breaking his Makers Iniunction: For if a man burne his hand in the fire, the bellowes that blowed the fire are
not to be blamed, but himselfe rather, for not being carefull to avoyde the danger: Yet if the bellowes had not
blowed, the fire had not burnt; no more is woman simply to bee condemned for mans transgression; for by the
free will, which before his fall hee inioyed, hee might haue auoyded, and beene free from beeing burnt; or
singed with that fire which was kindled by Sathan, and blowne by Eue. It therefore serued not his turne a
whit, afterwardes to say,
Gen.3.11.
The woman which thou gauest mee, gaue mee of the tree; and I did eat: For a penalty was
inflicted vpon him, as well as on the woman, the punishment of her transgression being
particular to her owne sex, and to none but the female kind: but for the sinne of man the
Genesis 3.17.
whole earth was cursed. And he being better able, then the woman, to haue resisted
temptation, because the stronger vessell, was first called to account, to shew, that to whom
much is giuen, of them much is required; and that he who was the soueraigne of all creatures visble, should
haue yeelded greatest obedience to God.
True it is (as is already confessed) that woman first sinned, yet finde wee no mention of spirituall
nakednesse till man had sinned; then
Genesis 3.12.
it is said, Their eyes were opened, the eies of their mind and conscience; and then perceiued
they themselves naked, that is, not onely bereft of that integritie, which they originally had,
but felt the rebellion & disobedience of their members in the disordered motions of their
now corrupt nature, which made them for shame to cover their nakednesse: then (and not afore) it is said that
they saw it, as if sinne were imperfect, and vnable to bring a depriuation of a blessing receiued, or death on all
mankind, till man (in whom lay the actiue power of generation) had transgressed. The offence therefore
of Adam and Eue is by Saint Austin thus distinguished, the man sinned against God and himselfe, the woman
against God, her selfe, and her husband: yet in her giuing of the fruit to eate had she no malicious intent
towardes him, but did therein shew a desire to make her husband partaker of that happinesse, which she
thought by their eating they should both haue enioyed. This her giuing Adam of that sawce, wherewith Sathan
had serued her, whose sowrenesse afore he had eaten, she did not perceiue, was that, which made her sinne to
exceede his: wherefore, that
Genesis 3.7.
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she might not of him, who ought to honour her, be abhorred, the first promise that was made
in Paradise, God makes to woman, that by her Seede should the Serpents head be broken:
whereupon Adam calls her Heuah, life, that as the woman had beene an occasion of his
Genesis 3.15.
sinne, so should she bring foorth the Sauiour from sinne, which was in the fullnesse of time
accomplished; by which was manifested, that he is a Sauiour of beleeuing women, no lesse
Galat.4 4.
then of men, that so the blame of sinne may not be imputed to his creature, which is good;
but to the will by which Euesinned, and yet by Christs assuming the shape of man was it
declared, that his mercie was equiualent to both Sexes; so that by [Heuahs] blessed Seed (as
Saint Paul affirmes) it is brought to passe, that male and female are all one in Christ Iesus.
1 Pet.3.7
To the second obiection I answer, That the Apostle doth not heereby exempt man from
sinne, but onely giueth to vnderstand, that the woman was the primarie transgressour; and
not the man, but that man was not at all deceiued, was farre from his meaning: for he
2 Obiection
afterward expressly saith, that asin Adam all die, so in Christ shall all be made aliue.
answered
For the third obiection, It is good for a man not touch a woman: The Apostle makes it
not a positiue prohibition, but speakes it onelie because of the Corinths present necessitie,
1 Cor.15.22.
who were then persecuted by the enemies of the Church, for which cause, and no other, hee
saith, Art thou loosed from a wife? seeke not a wife: meaning whilst the time of these
3 Obiection
perturbations should continue in their heate; but if thou art bound, seeke not to be loosed: if
answered.
thou marriest, then sinnest not, only increasest thy care: for the married careth for the things
of this world, And I wish that you were without care, that yee might cleaue fast vnto the
Lord without separation: For the time remaineth, that they which haue wiues be as though
1 Cor.7.
they had none: for the persecutors shall depriue you of them, eyther by imprisonment,
banishment, or death; so that manifest it is, that the Apostle doth not heereby forbid
marriage, but onely aduiseth the Corinths to forbeare a while, till God in mercie should curbe the fury of their
aduersaries. For (as Eusebius writeth) Paul was afterward married himselfe, the which is very probable, being
that interrogatiuely he
Galat.3.28.
saith, Haue we not power to leade about a wife, being a sister, as well as the rest of the
Apostles, and as the brethren of the Lord and Cephas?
The fourth and last objection, is that of Salomon, I haue found one man among a
4 Obiect
thousand, but a woman among them all haue I not found: for answere of which, if we looke
answered.
into the storie of his like, wee shall finde therein a Commentary vpon this enigmaticall
Sentence included: for it is there said, that Salomon had seuen hundred wiues, and three
Eccles 7.30.
hundred concubines, which number connexed make one thousand. These women turning his
heart away from being perfect with the Lord his God, sufficient cause had hee to say, that
1 King 11.3
among the said thousand women found he not one vpright. Hee saith not, that among a
thousand women neuer any man found one worthy of commendation, but speakes in the first
person singularly, I haue not found, meaning in his owne experience: for this assertion is to
Pagnine.
be holden a part of the confession his former follies, and no otherwise, his repentance being
the intended drift of Ecclesiastes.
Thus hauing (by Gods assistance) remoued those stones, whereat some haue stumbled, others broken their
shinnes, I will proceede toward the period of my intended taske, which is, to decipher the excellency of
women: of whose Creation I will, for orders sake, obserue; First, the efficient cause, which was God;
Secondly, the materiall cause, or that whereof shee was made; Thirdly, the formall cause, or fashion, and
proportion of her feature; Fourthly and lastly, the finall cause, the end or purpose for which she was made. To
beginne with the first.
The efficient cause of womans creation, was Iehouah the Eternall; the truth of which is manifest
in Moses his narration of the sixe dayes
1.Corint.9.5.
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workes, where he saith, God created them male and female: And David exhorting all the
earth to sing vnto the Lord; meaning, by a Metonimie, earth, all creatures that liue on the
earth, of what nation or Sex soeuer, giues this reason, For the Lord hath made vs.That worke
Psal.100.3.
then can not chuse but be good, yea very good, which is wrought by so excellent a
workeman as the Lord: for he being a glorious Creator, must needes effect a worthie
Psal.100.4.
creature. Bitter water can not proceede from a pleasant sweet fountaine, nor bad worke from
Math.19.17.
that workman which is perfectly good, & in proprietie, none but he.
Secondly, the materiall cause, or matter whereof woman was made, was of a refined
mould, if I may so speake: for man was created of the dust of the earth, but woman was
made of a part of man, after that he was a liuing soule:
Genesis 1.28.
yet was shee not produced from Adams foote, to be his too low inferiour; nor from his head
to be his superiour, but from his side, neare his heart, to be his equall; that where he is Lord,
she may be Lady: and therefore saith God concerning man and woman iointly,Let them rule
Genesis 1.26.
ouer the fish of the Sea, and ouer the foules of the Heauen, and ouer euery beast that moueth
vpon the earth: By which words, he makes their authority equall, and all creatures to be in
subiection vnto them both. This being rightly considered, doth teach men to make such account of their wiues,
as Adam did of Eue, This is bone of my bone, and flesh of my flesh: As also, that they neyther doe or wish
any more hurt vnto them,
Genesis 2.7.
then vnto their owne bodies: for men ought to loue their wiues as themselues, because hee
that loues his wife, loues himselfe: And neuer man hated his owne flesh (which the woman
is) vnlesse a monster in nature.
Ephes.5.28.
Thirdly, the formall cause, fashion, and proportion of woman was excellent: For she was
neyther like the beasts of the earth, foules of the ayre, fishes of the Sea, or any other
inferiour creature, but Man was the onely obiect, which she did resemble. For as God gaue man a lofty
countenance, that hee might looke vp toward Heauen, so did he likewise giue vnto woman. And as the
temperature of mans body is excellent, so is womans. For whereas other Creatures, by reason of their grosse
humours, haue excrements for their habite, as foules, their feathers, beasts, their haire, fishes, their scales,
man and woman onely, haue their
Genesis 2.13.
skinne cleare and smoothe. And (that more is) in the Image of God were they both created;
yea and to be briefe, all the parts of their bodies, both externall and internall, were
correspondent and meete each for other.
Fourthly and lastly, the finall cause, or end, for which woman was made, was to glorifie God, and so be a
collaterall companion for man to glorifie God, in vsing her bodie, and all the parts, powers, and faculties
thereof, as instruments for his honour: As with her voice to sound foorth his prayses; like Meriam, and the rest
of her company; with her tongue not to vtter words of strife, but to giue good councell vnto her husband, the
which hee must not despise. For Abraham was bidden to giue eare to Sarah his wife. Pilate was willed by his
wife
Gen.1.26.
Exod.15.20.
Genesis 21.12
Math.27.19.
Genesis 31.16
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not to haue anie hand in the condemning of C H R I S T; and a sinne it was in him, that hee
listned not to her: Leah and Rachel councelled Iaacob to do according to the word of the
Lord: and the Shunamite put her husband in mind of harbouring the Prophet Elisha: her
Luke 8.
hands shold be open according to her abilitie, in contributing towards Gods seruice, and
distressed seruants, like to that poore widdow, which cast two mites into the Treasurie; and
Luke 1.51.
as Marie Magdalen, Susanna, and Ioanna the wife of Herods Steward, with many other,
which of their substance ministred vnto C H R I S T. Her heart should be a receptacle for
Iohn 20.1.
Gods Word, like Mary that treasured vp the sayings of C H R I S T in her heart. Her feete
should be swift in going to seeke the Lord in his Sanctuarie, as Marie Magdalen made haste
to seeke C R I S T at his Sepulchre. Finally, no power externall or internall ought woman to
keep idle, but to imploy it in some seruice of G O D, to the glorie of her Creator, and comfort of her owne
soule.
The other end for which woman was made, was to be a Companion and helper for man; and if she must be
an helper, and but an helper, then are those husbands to be blamed, which lay the whole burthen of
domesticall affaires and maintenance on the shoulders of their wiues. For, as yoake-fellowes they are to
sustayne part of ech others cares, griefs, and calamities: But as if two Oxen be put in one yoke, the one being
bigger than the other, the greater beares most weight: so the Husband being the stronger vessell is to beare a
greater burthen then his wife; And therefore the Lord said to Adam,
2 Kings 4.9.
In the sweate of thy face shalt thou eate thy bread, till thou returne to the dust. And
Saint Paulsaith, That he that prouideth not for his household is worse then an Infidel.Nature
hath taught senselesse creatures to helpe one another; as the Male Pigeon, when his Hen is
1. Tim.5.8.
weary with sitting on her egges, and comes off from them, supplies her place, that in her
absence they may receiue no harme, vntill such time as she is fully refreshed. Of small Birds
the Cocke alwaies helpes his Hen to build her nest; and while she sits vpon her egges, he flies abroad to get
meat for her, who cannot then prouide any for her selfe. The crowing Cockrell helpes his Hen to defend her
Chickens from perill, and will indanger himselfe to saue her and them from harme. Seeing then that these
vnreasonable creatures, by the instinct of nature, beare such affection each to other, that without any grudge,
they willingly, according to their kind, helpe one another, I may reason à minore ad maius, that much more
should man and woman, which are reasonable creatures, be helpers each to other in all things lawfull, they
hauing the Law of God to guide them, his Word to bee a Lanthorne vnto their feete, and a Light vnto their
pathes, by which they are excited to a farre more mutuall participation of each others burthen, then other
creatures. So that neither the wife may say to her husband, nor the husband vnto his wife, I haue no need of
thee, no more then the members of the body may so say each to other, betweene whom there is such a
sympathie, that if one member suffer, all suffer with it: Therefore though God bade Abraham forsake his
Countrey and Kindred, yet he bade him not forsake his wife, who being Flesh of his flesh, and bone of his
bone, was to bee
Gen 3.19.
1.Cor.12.21.
Eccles 4.10.
Eccles 4.10.
1.Cor.11.7.
copartner with him of whatsoeuer did betide him[,] whether ioy or sorrow.
Wherefore Salomon saith, Woe to him that is alone; for when thoughts of discomfort,
troubles of this world, and feare of dangers do possesse him, he wants a companion to lift
him vp from the pit of perplexitie, into which hee is fallen: for a good wife, saith Plautus, is
the wealth of the minde, and the welfare of the heart; and therefore a meete associate for her
husband; And Woman, saith Paul, is the glorie of the man.
Marriage is a merri-age, and this worlds Paradise, where there is mutuall loue. Our
blessed Sauiour vouchsafed to honour a marriage with the first miracle that he wrought, vnto
which miracle matrimoniall estate may not vnfitly bee resembled: For as Christ turned water
into
Iohn 1.
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wine, a farre more excellent liquor; which, as the Psalmist saith,Makes glad the heart of
man; So the single man is by marriage changed from a Batchelour to a Husband, a farre
more excellent title: from a solitarie life vnto a ioyfull vnion and coniunction, with such a
creature as God hath made meete for man, for whom none was meete till she was made. The enioying of this
great blessing madePericles more vnwilling to part from his wife, then to die for his Countrie; And Antonius
Pius to poure forth that patheticall exclamation against death, for depriuing him of his deerely beloued wife, O
cruell hard-hearted death in bereauing mee of her whom I esteemed more then my own life! A vertuous
woman, saith Salomon, is the Crowne of her husband;
Psal.104.15.
By which metaphor hee sheweth both the excellencie of such a wife, and what account her
husband is to make of her: For a King doth not trample his Crowne vnder his feete, but
highly esteemes of it, gently handles it, and carefully laies it vp, as the euidence of his
Kingdome; and therefore when David destroyed Rabbah hee tooke off the Crowne from their Kings head: So
husbands should not account their wiues as their vassals, but as those that are heires together of the grace of
life, and with all lenitie and milde perswasions set their feete in the right way, if they happen to tread awry,
bearing with their infirmities, as Elkanah did
Prou.12.4.
with his wiues barrennesse.
The Kingdome of God is compared vnto the marriage of a Kings sonne:Iohn calleth the
coniunction of Christ and his Chosen, a Marriage: And not few, but many times, doth our
1.Pet.2.7.
blessed Sauiour in the Canticles, set forth his vnspeakable loue towards his Church vnder the
title of an Husband reioycing with his Wife; and often vouchsafeth to call her his Sister and
1.Sam.1.17.
Spouse, by which is shewed that with God is no respect of persons, Nations, or Sexes: For
Math.22.
whosoeuer, whether it be man or woman, that doth beleeue in the Lord Iesus,such shall bee
Reu.19.7.
saued. And if Gods loue euen from the beginning, had not beene as great toward woman as
to man, then would hee not haue preserued from the deluge of the old world as many women
Rom.2.11.
as men; nor would Christ after his Resurrection haue appeared vnto a woman first of all
other, had it not beene to declare thereby, that the benefites of his death and resurrection, are
as auailable, by beleefe, for women as for men; for hee indifferently died for the one sex as
Iohn 3:13.
well as the other: Yet a truth vngainesayable is it, that the Man is the womans Head; by
which title yet of Supremacie, no authoritie hath hee giuen him to domineere, or basely
command and imploy his wife, as a seruant; but hereby is he taught the duties which hee oweth
1.Chron.20.2.
1.Cor.11.3.
Ephe.5.23.
Iob 1 4.
Iohn 15.12.
vnto her: For as the head of a man is the imaginer and contriuer of proiects profitable for the
safety of his whole body; so the Husband must protect and defend his Wife from iniuries:
For he is her Head, as Christ is the Head of his Church, which hee entirely loueth, and for
which hee gaue his very life; the deerest thing any man hath in this world; Greater loue then
this hath no man, when he bestoweth his life for his friend, saith our Sauior: This president
passeth all other patternes, it requireth great benignity, and enioyneth an extraordinary
affection, For men must loue their wiues, euen as Christ loued his Church. Secondly, as the
Head doth not iarre or contend with the members, which being many, as the Apostle
saith,yet make but one bodie, no more must the husband with the wife, but
1. Cor.12.20
Col. 3.19.
1. Pet.3.7.
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expelling all bitternesse and cruelty hee must liue with her louingly, and religiously,
honouring her as the weaker vessell. Thirdly, and lastly, as hee is her Head, hee must, by
instruction, bring her to the knowledge of her Creator, that so she may be a fit stone for the
1.Pet.3.18.
Lords building. Women for this end must haue an especiall care to set their affections vpon
such as are able to teach them, that as they grow in yeares, they may grow in grace, and in
the knowledge of Christ Iesus our Lord.
Thus if men would remember the duties they are to performe in being heads, some would not stand a
tiptoe as the doe, thinking themselues Lords & Rulers, and account euery omission of performing whatsoeuer
they command, whether lawfull or not, to be matter of great disparagement, and il dignity done them; whereas
they should consider, that women are enioyned to submite themselues vnto their husbands no other waies then
asthe Lord, so that from hence, for man, ariseth a lesson not to bee forgotten, that as the Lord commandeth no
thing to be done, but that which is right and
1.Cor.14.15.
good, no more must the husband; for if a wife fulfill the euill command of her husband, shee
obeies him as a tempter, as Saphira did Ananias. But least I should seeme too partiall in
praysing women so much as I haue (though no more then warrant from Scripture doth allow)
Actes 5.2.
I adde to the premises, that I say not, all women are vertuous, for then they should be more
excellent then men, sith of Adams sonnes there was Cain as well as Abel, and of Noah,
Cham as well as Sem; so that of men as of women, there are two sorts, namely, good and bad, which
in Mathew the fiue and twenty chapter, are comprehended vnder the name of Sheepe and Goats. And if
women were not sinfull, then should they not need a Sauiour: but the Virgin Mary a patterne of
piety, reioyced in God her Sauoiur: Ergo, she was a sinner. In the Reuelation the Church is called the Spouse
of Christ; and in Zachariah,wickednesse is called a woman, to shew that of women there are both godly and
Ephes.5.
Luke 1.47.
Zech.5.7.
Gen.18.25.
Esay. 5.20.
Prou.17.15.
vngodly: For Christ would not Purge his Floore if there were not Chaffe among the Wheate;
not should gold neede to bee fined, if among it there were no drosse. But farre be it from any
one, to condemne the righteous with the wicked, or good women with the bad (as the Bayter
of women doth:) For though there are some scabbed sheepe in a Flocke, we must not
therefore conclude all the rest to bee mangie: And though some men, through excesse, abuse
Gods creatures, wee must not imagine that all men are Gluutons, the which wee may with as
good reason do, as condemne all women in generall, for the offences of some particulars. Of
the good sort is it that I haue in this booke spoken, and so would I that all that reade should
so vnderstand me: for if otherwise I had done, I should haue incurred that woe, which by the
Prophet Isaiah is pronounced against them that speake well of euill, and should
haue iustified the wicked, which thing is abhominable to the Lord.
The Epilogus or vpshot of the premises.
G
Reat was the vnthankefulnesse of Pharaohs Butler vnto Ioseph: for though hee had done him a great
pleasure, of which the
Butler promised requitall, yet was hee quite forgotten of him: But fare greater is the
ingratitude of those men toward God, that dare presume to speake and exclaime
against Woman, whom God did create for mans comfort. What greater discredit can redound
to a workeman, then to haue the man, for whom hee hath made it, say, it is naught? or what greater discurtesie
can be offered to one, that bestoweth a gift, then to haue the receiuer giue out, that hee cares not for it; For he
needes it not? And what greater ingratitude can be shewed vnto G O D then the opprobrious speeches and
disgracefull inuectiues, which some diabolicall natures doe frame against women?
Gen.40.23.
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Ingratitude is, and alwayes hath beene accounted so odious a vice, thatCicero saith, If one doubt what
name to giue a wicked man, let him call him an vngratefull person, and then hee hath said enough. It was so
detested among the Persians, as that by a Law they prouided, that such should suffer death as felons, which
prooued vnthankefull for any gift receiued. And Loue (saith the Apostle) is the fulfulling of the Lawe:
But where Ingratitude is harbored, there Loue is banished. Let men therefore beware of all
vnthankefulnesse, but especially of the superlatiue ingratitude, that which is towards God,
which is no way more palpably declared, then by the contemning of, and rayling against
women, which sinne, of some men (if to be termed men) no doubt but God will one day auenge,when they
shall plainely perceiue, that it had been better for them to haue been borne dumbe and lame, then to haue vsed
their tongs and hands, the one is repugning, the other in writing against Gods handie worke, their owne flesh,
women I meane, whom God hath made equall with themselues in dignity, both temporally and eternally, if
they continue in the faith: which God for his mercie sake graunt they alwayes may, to the glory of their
Creator, and comfort of their owne soules, through Christ Amen.
Rom.13.10.
To God onely wise be glorie now and for
euer, A M E N.
Certaine
Q V Æ R E S
to the bayter of
Women.
WITH
CONFVTATION
of some part of his Diabolicall Discipline.
[printer's mark]
L O N D O N,
Printed by N.O. Thomas Archer,
and are to be sold at his shop in
Popes-head-Pallace.
1617.
To the Reader.
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Lthough (curteous Reader) I am young in yeares, and more defectiue in knowledge, that
little smattering in Learning, which I haue obtained, being only the fruit of such vacant
houres, as I could spare from affaires befitting my Sex, yet I am not altogether ignorant of
that Analogie which ought to be vsed in a literate Responsarie: But the Beare bayting of
Women, vnto which I haue framed my Apologeticall answere, beeing altogether without
methode, irregular, without Grammaticall Concordance, and a promiscuous mingle mangle,
it would admit no such order to bee observed in the answering thereof, as a regular
Respo[n]sarie requireth.
Wherefore (gentle Reader) fauorably cõsider, that as that Painter is not to be held vnskilfull, which
hauing a deformed Obiect, makes the like portraiture; no more am I iustly to be blamed for my immethodicall
Apologie, sith any iudicious Reader may plainely see, that the Bayter of Women his pestiferous obtrectation
is like a Taylers Cushion, that is botcht together of shreddes, so that, were it not to preuent future infection
with that venome, which he hath, and daily doth sweate out, I would haue beene loath to haue spent time so
idley, as to answere it all: but a crooked pot-lid well enough fits a wrie-neckt pot, an vnfashioned shooe a misshapen foote, and an illiterate answere an vnlearned irreligious prouocation. His absurdities therein
contayned, are so many, that to answere them seuerally, were as friuolous a worke, as to make a Trappe for a
Flea, and as tedious as the pursuite of an Arrow to an impotent man. Yet to preuent his hauing occasion to
say, that I speake of many, but can instance none, I haue thought it meete to present a few of them to his view,
as followeth, that if Follie haue taken roote in him, he may seeke to extirpate it, and to blush at the sight of
that fruit, which he hath already brought foorth; a fruite I call it (not vnfitly I hope) because a Crabbe may be
so termed, as well as a good Apple. Thus, not doubting of the fauour of well affected, and of their kinde
acceptance of my indeuours, of which I desire not applaud, but approbation: I rest,
Your friend,
R A C H E L S P E G H T.
The Preface vnto the
Subseq[u]ent.
Ith edged tooles (saith the old Prouerbe) it is ill sporting, but farre more dangerous: yea
damnable is it to dally with Scripture, the two-edged Sword of the Eternall: for so to doe is
a breach of the third Commandement; and he that failes in one point, is guiltie of all. If the
magnitude of this sinne had beene considered by the Bayter of Women, the lamentable, yet
iust reward thereof, as of all other sinnes without repentance, would, if he had but a seruile
feare, haue restrained
him from transgressing herein. But as one deuoide of all true feare of Gods indignation
against wilfull sinners (for as ignorance doth somewhat extenuate a fault, so doth knowledge
much aggrauate it) he hath made the exordium of his brainesicke exhalation against women,
Iames 2.10.
to be a peruerting of a part of holy writ; ex vnguibus leonem, iudge of this Lion by his pawe.
For if the fore foot be monstrous, doubtlesse the whole bodie is correspondent thereto. The
Porch indeede is foule, but hee that viewes the sequel, as I haue done, shall find a laystall of heathenish
Assertions, Similies, and Examples, illiterate composition, irreligious inuectiues, and (which is worst)
impious blasphemies therein included, filthy rubbish, more fitte to be heaped vp by a Pagan, then one that
beareth the name of a Christian.
But lest it should not onely be thought; but also said, that I finde fault where none is; or that I do ill to
mislike the Worke, and not make the Author therewith acquainted, that if he please, hee may answer for
Hebr.4.12.
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himselfe: I thinke it not amisse to propose some few Quæres vnto the Bayter of Women, which I haue
abstracted out of his infamous Booke, as himselfe confesseth it to be in his Epistle to Women.
[headpiece]
Certaine Quæres to the Bayter
of women, with confutation of
some part of his Diabolicall
Discipline.
F it bee true, asse you affirme, Pag .2. line 26. That women will not giue thankes for a good
turne.
I demand whether Deborah and Hannah were not women, who both of them sang
hymnes of thankesgiuing vnto the Lord; the one for his mercy in granting her victory
ouer Israelsenemies, the other for his fauourable giuing vnto her a son, which she full oft
and earnestly had desired?
And where-asse you say, Page 4. line 22. that
Iudg.5.
1 Sam.1.11.
&2.1
1 Sam.25.3.
Gen.14.16.18.
Math 12.25.
a woman that hath a faire face, it is euer matched with a cruel heart, and her heauenly lookes
with hellish thoughts: You therein shew your selfe a contradictor of Scriptures presidents:
For Abigail was a beautifull woman, and tenderhearted; Rebekah was both faire of face and
pittiful. Many examples seruing to confute your vniuersall rule might bee produced, but
these are sufficient to dispell this your cloud of vntruth. As for your audacitie in iudging of
womens thoughts, you thereby shew your selfe an vsurper against the King of heauen, the
true knowledge of cogitatons being appropriate vnto him alone.
If your assertion, That A woman is better lost then found, better forsaken then
taken (Page 5. line 4.) be to be credited, me thinkes, great pitty it is, that afore you were
borne, there was none so wise as to counsell your father not to meddle with a woman, that
hee might haue escaped those troubles, which you affirme, that all married men are cumbred
with, Page 2. line 20. As also that hee might not haue begotten such a monster in
nature Asse your selfe, who (like the Priest which forgot he was Parish Clearke) defame and
exclaime against women, as though your selfe had neuer had a mother, or you neuer beene a
child.
You affirme (Page 10. line 18.) that for the Loue of women, Dauid purchased the displeasure of his
God: It had beene good that you had cited the place of story where you finde it, For I neuer yet in Scripture
read, that the Almighty was displeased with Dauid for his loue to women, but for his lust toBathsheba, which
afterward brought forth his adulterous act, and his causingVriah to be murthered.
In saying (Page 10. line. 25.) that Iobs wife counselled her husband to curse God, you
misconster the Text; for the true construction thereof will shew it to bee
a Scarcasmus or Ironicall speech, and not an instigation to blasphemie.
Page 11. line 8. you count it wonderfull to see the mad feates of women, for shee will now bee merry, then
sad: but me thinkes it is farre more wonder-fooleto haue one, that aduentures to make his Writing as publique
as an In-keepers Signe, which hangs to the view of all passengers, to want Grammaticall Concordance in his
said Writing, and ioyne together Women plurall, and sheesingular, Asse you not onely in this place, but also
in others haue done.
Albeit the Scripture verifieth, that God made woman and brought her to man; and that a prudent wife
commeth of the Lord: yet haue
1.Sam.11.
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you not feared blasphemously to say, that women sprung from the diuell, Page 15. line 26.
But being, as it seemes, defectiue in that whereof you haue much need (for mendacem
oportet esse memorem) you suddainely after say, That women were created by God and
formed by nature, and therefore by policie and wisedome to be auoyded, Page 16. line 12.
An impious conclusion to inferre, that because God created, therefore to be auoyded: Oh intollerable
absurdity!
Men I say may liue without women, but women cannot liue without men,Page 14. line 18. If any
Religious Author had thus affirmed, Ishould haue wondred, that vnto Satans suggestions he had so much
subiected himselfe, as to crosse the Almighties prouidence and care for mans good, who positiuely said,It is
not good for man
Gen 2.22.
Prou.19.14.
to bee alone; But being that the sole testimony heereof is your owne dico, I maruell no whit
at the errour, but heartily wish, that vnto all the vntruths you haue vttered in your infamous
booke, you had subscribed your Dico, that none of them might bee adiudged truths:
For mendacis præmium est verbis eius non adhiberi fidem.
Page 17. line 5. you affirme, that Hosea was brought vnto Idolatrie by marrying with a lewd
woman, which is as true as the sea burnes: and for proofe thereof you cite Hosea I. in which chapter is no
such matter to be found, it onely containing a declaration of the Lords anger against the adulterous Iewes,
who had gone a whoring after other Gods, set forth in a parable of an husband and an adulterous wife.
Page 19. Theodora a monstrous strumpet, Lauia, Floria, and Lais, were three notable Curtizans.
Was not that noble Citie of Troy, sacked and spoyled for the faire Helena?Page 21. Therefore stay not
alone in the company of a woman, trusting to thy owne chastity, except thou bee more strong
then Sampson, more wise thenSalomon, or more holy then David, for these, and many more haue beene
ouercome by the sweete intisements of women, Page 22.
I may as well say Barrabas was a murtherer, Ioab killed Ab[n]er andAmasa, and Pharaoh
Necho slew Iosiah, therefore stay not alone in the
Gen.2.15.
companie of a man, trusting to thy owne strength, except thou bee stronger then Iosiah, and
more valiant then Abner and Amasa, for these and many more haue beene murthered by
men. The forme of argumentation is your owne, the which if you dislike, blame your selfe
2.Sam.3.27
for proposing such a patterne, and blush at your owne folly,Quod te posse non facile
2 Sam.20 10.
credo: for it is an old saying, how true I know not, that blushing is a signe of grace.
2 King 23.29.
Page 31. line 15. If God had not made women onely to bee a plague to man, hee would
neuer haue called them necessarie. euils. Albeit I haue not readSeaton or Ramus, nor so
much as seene (though heard of) Aristotles Arganox,yet by that I haue seene and reade in compasse of my
apprehension, I will aduenture to frame an argument or two, to shew what danger, for this your blasphemy
[you] are in.
To fasten a lie vpon God is blasphemy: But the Bayter of women fastens a lie vpon
God: ergo, the Bayter is a blasphemer.
The Proposition, I trowe, none will gaine say, the assumption I thus proue,
Whosoeuer affirmes God to haue called women necessary euils, fastens a lie vpon God: For from the
beginning of Genesis to the end of the Reuelation is no such instance to be found: But the Bayter affirmes
God to haue called women,Ergo, the Bayter fastens a lie vpon God.
Luke 23.19.
The reward according to Law Diuine due
vnto the Bayter of women.
Whosoeuer blasphemeth God, ought by his Law, to die; The Bayter of Women hath blasphemed
God, Ergo, he ought to die the death.
The proposition is vpon record, Leuit. 24.14.16. The Assumption is formerly proued.
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If thou marryest a still and a quiet woman, that will seeme to thee that thou ridest but an ambling horse to
hell, but if with one that is froward and vnquiet, then thou wert as good ride a trotting horse to the diuell.Page
35. Line 13.
If this your affirmation be true, then seemes it, that hell is the period of all married mens trauailes, and the
center of their circumference. A man can but haue either a good wife or a bad; and if he haue the former, you
say he doth but seeme to amble to hell; if the latter, he were as good trot to the diuell: But if married men ride,
how trauaile Batchelours? surely, by your rule they must go on foote, because they want wiues; which
(inclusiuely) you say are like horses to carry their husbands to hell. Wherefore in my minde, it was not
without mature consideration that you married in time, because it would be too irksome for you to trauaile so
tedious a journey on foote.
Now the fire is kindled, let vs burne this other faggot. Page 38. line 4.
Beware of making too great a fire, lest the surplussage of that fires effect which you intended for others,
singe your selfe.
Shee will make thee weare an Oxe feather in thy Cappe. Page 44. line 4.
If Oxen haue feathers, their haires more fitly may be so termed then their hornes.
Page 50. line 28. There is no ioy nor pleasure in this world which may be compared to Marriage,for if the
husband be poore and in aduersitie, then hee beares but the one halfe of the griefe: and furthermore, his wife
will comfort him, with all the comfortable meanes she can deuise.
Page 51. line 16. Many are the ioyes and sweete pleasures in Marriage, as in our children, &c.
Page 34. line 5. There are many troubles comes galloping at the heeles of a woman. If thou wert a Seruant,
or in bondage afore, yet when thou marriest, thy toyle is neuer the nearer ended, but euen then, and not before,
thou changest thy golden life, which thou didst leade before (in respect of the married) for a droppe of hony,
which quickely turnes to be as bitter as wormewood.
Page 53. line 19. The husband ought (in signe of loue) to impart his secrets and counsell vnto his wife, for
many haue found much comfort and profite by taking their wiues counsell; and if thou impart any ill happe to
thy wife, shee lighteneth thy griefe, either by comforting thee louingly, or else, in bearing a part thereof
patiently.
Page 41. line 12. If thou vnfouldest any thing of secret to a woman, the more thou chargest her to keepe it
close, the more shee will seeme, as it were, with childe, till shee haue reuealed it.
It was the saying of a iudicious Writer, that whoso makes the fruit of his cogitations extant to the view of
all men, should haue his worke to be as a well tuned Instrument, in all places according and agreeing, the
which I am sure yours doth not: For how reconcile you those dissonant places aboue cited? or how make you
a consonant diapason of those discords wanting harmony?
Page 34. line 19. You counsell all men, to shunne idlenesse, and yet the first words of your Epistle to
Women are these, musing with my selfe being idle:Heerein you appeare, not vnlike vnto a Fencer, which
teacheth another how to defend himselfe from enemies blowes, and suffers himselfe to be stricken without
resistance: for you warne others, to eschew that dangerous vice, wherewith (by your owne confession) your
selfe is stained.
Page 57. line 5. If thou like not my reasons to expell loue, then thou mayest trie Ouids Art, for he
counsells those that feele this horrible heate to coole their flames with hearbes which are colde of nature as
Rew, &c.
Albeit you doubt not but by some to be reputed for a good Archer, yet heere you shot wide from the truth,
in saying without contradiction of Ouids errour, that Rew is of a cold nature: For most Physitions (if not all)
both ancient and moderne, holde it to be hote and drie in the third degree: and experience will tell the vser
thereof, that the temperature is hote, not colde. And though the sense of tasting, without further triall, doth
repell this errour, I doubt not but in citing this prescription, you haue verified the opinion of that philosopher,
which said, That there are some, who thinke they speake wisest, and write most iudiciously, when they
vnderstand not themselues.
But, vt opus ad finem per ducam, sith I haue trode my vtmost intended steppe, though left one path
vngone, I meane the Beare bayting of Widdowesvnviewd, in that I am ignorant of their dispositions,
accounting it a follie of me to talke of Robin-hood, as many doe, that neuer shot in his Bowe, I leaue the
speculation (with approbation of their Beare bayting) to those that regard neyther affabilitie nor humanitie,
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and wishing vnto euery such Misogunes, aTiburne Tiffenie for curation of his swolne necke, which onely
through a Cynicall inclination will not indure the yoke of lawfull Matrimony, I bid farewell.
F
I
N
I
S
ret, fume or frump at me who will, I care not,
will thrust forth thy sting to hurt, and spare not:
ow that the taske I vndertooke is ended,
dread not any harme to me intended,
ith iustly none herein haue I offended.
Pag. 7 line 7. for Herods reade Heuahs.
[printers ornament]
A Mouzell for Melastomus (1617)
Rachel Speght
Note on the e-text: this Renascence Editions text is that of the edition of 1617, from a copy in the collection of
the Harvard College Library. The transcription was done by Shirley Marc, Center for the Study of Women in
Society, University of Oregon. This edition is in the public domain. Content unique to this presentation is
copyright © 1998 The University of Oregon. For nonprofit and educational uses only.
A
MOVZELL FOR
MELASTOMVS,
The Cynicall Bayter of, and foule
mouthed Barker against
EVAHS SEX.
________________________________________
Or an Apologeticall Answere to
that Irreligious and Illiterate
pamphlet made by Io. Sw. and by him
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Intituled, The Arraignment
of Women.
________________________________________
By Rachel Speght.
________________________________________
P R O V E R B 26.5
A[n]swer a foole according to his foolishness, lest he be wise in
his owne conceit.
________________________________________
LONDON.
Printed by Nicholas Okes for Thomas Archer, and
are to be sold at his shop in Popeshead Pallace. 1617.
To all vertuous Ladies Honourable or Worshipfull, and to all other
of Heuahs sex fearing God, and louing their
iust reputation, grace and peace through
Christ, to eternall glory.
T was the simile of that wise and learned Lactantius, that if fire, though but with a small
sparke kindled, bee not at the first quenched, it may worke great mischiefe and dammage:
So likewise may the scandals and defamations of the malevolent in time proue pernitious,
if they bee not nipt in the head at their first appearance. The consideration of this (right
Honourable and Worshipfull Ladies) hath incited me. (though yong, and the vnworthiest of
thousands) to encounter with a furious enemy to our sexe, least if his vniust imputations
should continue without answere, he might insult and account himselfe a victor; and by
such a conceit deale, as Historiographers report the vpier to doe, who in the Winter time doth vomit forth her
poyson, and in the spring time sucketh the same vp againe, which becommeth twise as deadly as the former:
And this our pestiferous enemy, by thinking to prouide a more deadly poyson for women, then already he
hath foamed forth, may euaporate, by an addition vnto his former illeterate Pamphlet (intituled The
Arraignement of Women) a more contagious obtrectation then he hath already done, and indeed hath
threatned to doe. Secondly, if it should haue had free passage without any answere at all (seeing
that Tacere is, quasi consentire) the vulgar ignorant might haue beleeued his Diabolicall infamies to be
infallible truths, not to bee infringed; whereas now they may plainely perceiue them to bee but the scumme of
Heathenish braines, or a building raised without a foundation (at least from sacred Scripture) which the winde
of Gods truth must needs cast downe to the ground. A third reason why I haue aduentured to fling this stone at
vaunting Goliah is, to comfort the mindes of all Heuahs sex, both rich and poore, learned and vnlearned, with
this Antidote, that if the feare of God reside in their hearts, maugre all aduersaries, they are highly esteemed
and accounted of in the eies of their gracious Redeemer, so that they need not feare the darts of enuy or
obtrectators: For shame and disgrace (saith Aristotle) is the end of them that shoote such poysoned shafts.
Worthy therefore of imitation is that example of Senec[a], who when he was told that a certaine man did
exclaime and raile against him, made this milde answere; Some dogs barke more vpon custome than
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curstnesse; and some speake euill of others, not that the defamed deserue it, but because through custome and
corruption of their hearts they cannot speake well of any. This I alleage as a paradigmatical patterne for all
women, noble & ignoble to follow, that they be not enflamed with choler against this our enraged aduersarie,
but patiently consider of him according to the portraiture which he hath drawne of himselfe, his Writings
being the very embleme of a monster.
This my briefe Apologie (Right Honourable and Worshipfull) did I enterprise, not as thinking my selfe
more fit then others to vndertake such a taske, but as one, who not perceiuing any of our Sex to enter the Lists
of encountring with this our grand enemy among men, I being out of all feare, because armed with the truth,
which though often blamed, yet can neuer be shamed, and the Word of Gods Spirit, together with the example
of vertues Pupils for a Buckler, did no whit dread to combate with our said maleuolent aduersarie. And if in
so doing I shall bee censured by the iudicious to haue the victorie, and shall have giuen content vnto the
wronged, I haue both hit the marke whereat I aymed, and obtained that prize which I desired. But
if Zoilusshall adiudge me presumptuous in Dedicating this my Chirograph vnto personages of so high ranke;
both because of my insufficiency in literature and tendernesse in yeares: I this Apologize for my selfe; that
feeling the Bayter of Women hathopened his mouth against noble as well as ignoble; against the rich as well
as the poore; therefore meete it is that they should be ioynt spectators of this encounter: And withall in regard
of my imperfection both in learning and age, I need so much the more to impetrate patronage from some of
power to sheild mee from the biting wrongs of Momus, who ofententimes setteth a rankling tooth into the
sides of truth. Wherefore I being of Dictus his mind, who deemed himselfe safe vnder the shield
of Cæsar, haue presumed to shelter my selfe vnder the wings of you (Honourable personages) against the
persecuting heate of this fierie and furious Dragon; desiring that you would be pleased, not to looke so
much ad opus, as ad animum: And so not doubting of the fauourable acceptance and censure of all vertuously
affected, I rest
Your Honours and worships
Humbly at commandement,
Rachel Speght.
I f Reason had but curb'd thy witlesse will,
O r feare of God restrain'd thy rauing quill,
S uch venome fowle thou would'st base blight to spue:
E xcept that Grace haue bidden thee adue:
P rowesse disdaines to wrastle with the weake,
H eatheish affected, care not what they speake.
S educer of the vulgar sort of men,
W as Sathan crept into thy filthie Pen,
E nflaming thee with such infernall smoake,
T hat (if thou had'st thy will) should women choake?
N efarious fiends thy sence hauing deluded,
A nd from thee all humanitie excluded
M onster of men , worthie no other name
For that thou did'st assay our Sex to shame.
RA. SP.
________________________________________
Faults escaped in this impression.
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Page 1. lin. 13. in the Preface for rearingreade fearing.
page 4. line 17. for Ironica reade Ironia.
page 7. line 19. for not touche reade not to touch.
page 11 line 20. for Meriam reade miriam.
page 21. line 13. for tongs reade tongues.
page 32. line 17.for adulterous reade idolatrous.
page 33. line 30.for Arganex reade Organon.
Not vnto the veriest Ideot that
Euer set Pen to Paper, but to the
Cynicall Bayter of Women, or,
metamorphosed Milogunca,
Ioseph Swetnam.
Rom standing water, which soon putrifies, can no good fish be expected, for it produceth
no other creatures but those that are venemous or noisome, as snakes, adders, and such like.
Semblably, no better streame can we looke, should issue from your idle corrupt braine,
then that whereto the ruffe of your fury (to vse your owne words) hath moued you to open
the slaite. In which excremene of your roaring cogitations you haue vsed such irregularities
touching concordance, and obserued so disoredered a methode, as I doubt not to rely on,
that a very Accidence Schollar would haue quite put you downe in both. You appeare
herein not vnlike that Painter, who seriously indeuouring topourtray Cupids Bowe forgot the String: for you,
beeing greedie to botch vp your mingle mangle inuectiue against Women; haue not therein obserued, in many
places, so much [as] Gramm[a]r sense. But the emptiest Barrell makes the lowdest sound; and so we will
account of you.
Many propositions haue you framed, which (as you thinke) make much against Women, but if one would
make a Logicall assumption, the conclusion would be flat against your owne Sex. Your dealing wants so
much discretion, that I doubt whether to bestow so good a name as the Dunce vpon you: but Minoricy bids me
keepe within my bounds; and therefore I onlie say vnto you, that your corrupt Heart and railing To[n]gue,
hath made you a fit scribe for the Diuell.
In that you haue termed your virulent foame, the Beare-bayting of Women,you haue plainely displayed
you[r] owne disposition to be Cynicall, in that there appeares no other Dogge or Bull, to bayte them, but your
selfe. Good had it beene for you to haue put on that Muzzell, which Saint Lance would haue all Christians to
weare; Speake not euill one of another: and then had you not seemed so like the
Serpent Porphirus, as now you doo, which, though full of deadly poyson, yet being
toothlesse, hurteth none so much as himselfe. For you hauing gone beyond the limits not
of Humanitie alone, butof Christianitie, haue done greater harme vnto your owne soule, then vnto women, as
may plainely appeare. First, in dishonoring of God by palpable blasphemy, wresting and peruerting euerie
place of Scripture, that you haue alleadged; which by the testimony of Saint Peter,
Iames 4.11.
is to the destruction of them that so doe. Secondly, it appeares by your disparaging of, and
opprobrious speeches against that excellent worke of Gods hands, which in his great loue he
perfected for the comfort of man. Thirdly, and lastly, by this your hodge-podge of
heathenish Sentences, Similies, and Examples, you haue set forth your selfe in your right colours, vnto the
view of the world: and I doubt not but the Iudicious will account of you according to your demerit: As for the
Pet. 3.16.
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Vulgar sort, which haue no more learning then you haue shewed in your Booke, it is likely they will applaud
you for your paines.
As for your Bugge-beare or aduice vnto Women, that whatsoeuer they doe thinke of your Worke, they
should conceale it, lest in finding fault, they bewray their galled backes to the world, in which you allude to
that Prouerbe, Rubbe a galled horse, and he will kicke: Vnto it I answere by way of Apologie, that though
everie galled horse, being touched, doth kicke; yet euery one that kickes, is not galled: so that you might as
well haue said, that because burnt folks dread the fire, therfore none feare fire but those that are burnt, as
made that illiterate conclusion which you haue absurdly inferred.
In your Title Leafe, you arraigne none but lewd, idle, froward and vnconstant women, but in the Sequele
(through defect of memorie as it seemeth) forgetting that you had made a distinction of good from badde,
condemning all in generall, you aduise men to beware of, and not to match with any of these sixe sorts of
women, viz. Good and Badde, Faire and Foule, Richand Poore: But this doctrine of Diuells
Saint Paul foreseeing would be broached in the latter
times, giues warning of.
There also you promise a Commendation of wise, vertuous, and honest women, when as
in the subsequent, the worst words, and filthiest Epithites that you can deuise, you bestow on
them in generall, excepting no sort of Women. Heerein may you be likened vnto a man, which vpon the doore
of a scuruie house sets this Superscription, Heere is a very faire house to be let:whereas the doore being
opened, it is no better then a dogge-hole and darke dungeon.
Further, if your owne words be true, that you wrote with your hand, but not with your heart, then you are
an hypocrite in Print: but it is rather to be thought that your Pen was the bewrayer of the abundance of your
minde, and that this was but a little morter to dawbe vp agayne the wall, which you intended to breake
downe.
The reuenge of your rayling Worke wee leaue to Him, who hath appropriated vengeance vnto himselfe,
whose Pen-man hath included Raylers in the Catalogue of them that shall not inherite Gods Kingdome, and
your selfe vnto the mercie of that iust Iudge, who is able to saue and to destroy.
1.Tim.4.3
Your vndeserued friend,
R A C H E L S P E G H T.
________________________________________
In praise of the Author and her Worke.
I
F littleDauid that for Israels sake,
esteemed neyther life nor limbe too deare,
In that he did aduenture without dread,
to cast at him, whom all the hoste did feare,
A stone, which brought Goliah to the ground,
Obtain'd applause with Songs and Timbrels sound.
Then let another young encombatant
receiue applause, and thanks, as well as hee:
For with an enemie to Women kinde,
she hath encountred, as each wight may see:
And with the fruit of her industrious toyle,
To this Goliah she hath giuen the foyle.
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Admire her much I may, both for her age,
and this her Mouzell for a blacke-mouth'd wight,
But praise her, and her worke, to that desert,
which vnto them belongs of equall right
I cannot; onely this I say, and end,
Shee is vnto her Sex a faithfull friend.
P H I L A L E T H E S.
________________________________________
I
F he that for his Countrie doth expose
himselfe vnto the furie of his foe,
Doth merite praise and due respect of those,
for whom he did that perill vndergoe:
Then let the Author of this Mouzell true
Receiue the like, of right it is her due.
For she to shield her Sex from Slaunders Dart,
and from inuectiue obtrectation,
Hath ventured by force of Learnings Art,
(in which she hath had eductation)
To combate with him, which doth shame his Sex,
By offring feeble women to perplex.
P H I L O M A T H E S.
________________________________________
P
Raise is a debt, which doth of due belong
To those, that take the path ov Vertues trace,
Meating their wayes and workes by Reasons rule,
Hauing their hearts so lightned with Gods grace,
That wi[ll]ingly they would not him offend,
But holily their Lives beginne and end.
Of such a Pupil vnto Pietie
As is describ'd, I doe intend to speake,
A Virgin young, and of such tender age,
As for encounter may be deemd too weake.
Shee hauing not as yet seene twenty yeares,
Though in her carriage older she appeares.
Her wit and learning in this present Worke,
More praise doth merit, then my quill can write:
Her magnanimitie deserues applaud,
In vetring with a fierie foe to fight:
And now in fine, what shall I further say?
But that she beares the triumph quite away.
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F A V O V R B.
A Mouzell for Melastomus the
Cynicall Bayter of, and foulemouthed Barker against
E V A H S Sex.
P R O V E R B S 18. 22.
He that findeth wife, findeth a good thing, and
receiueth fauour of the Lord.
F lawfull it bee to compare the Potter with his Clay, or theArchitect with the Edifice, then
may I, in some sort, resemble that loue of God towards man, in creating woman, vnto the
affectionate care of Abraham for his sonne Isaac, who that hee might not take to wife one
of the daughters of the Canaanites,did prouide him one of his owne kindred.
Almighty God, who is rich in mercie, hauing made all things of
Gen.24.4
nothing, and created man in his owne image: that is, (as the Apostle
expounds it) In wisedome, righteousnesse and true holinesse, making him Lord ouer all: to Ephe.2.4
auoide that solitarie condition that hee was then in, hauing none to commerce or conuerse
withall but dumbe creatures, it seemed good vnto the Lord, that as of euery creature hee had
Col.5.50.
made male and female, and man onely being alone without mate, so likewise to forme an
helpe meete for him. Adam for this cause being cast into a heauy sleepe, God extracting a rib
from his side, thereof made, or built, Woman; shewing thereby, that man was as an vnperfect Gen.2.10.
building afore woman was made, and bringing her vnto Adam, vnited and married them
together.
Thus the resplendent loue of God toward man appeared, in taking care to prouide him an helper before hee
saw his owne want, and in prouiding him such an helper as should bee meete for him. Soueraignety had hee
ouer all creatures, and they were all seruiceable vnto
him, but yet afore woman was formed, there was not a meete helpe found for Adam. Mans
worthinesse not meriting this great fauour at Gods hands, but his mercie onely mouing him
therevnto: I may vse those words which the Iewesvttered whn they saw Christ weepe
John 11 36.
for Lazarus, Behold how hee loued him:Behold, and that with good regard, Gods loue; yea
his great loue, which from the beginning hee hath borne vnto man: which, as it appeares in
all things; so next, his loue in Christ Iesus apparantly in this; that for mans sake, that hee might not be an
vnite, when all other creatures were for procreation duall, hee created woman to bee a
Gen. 2.20
1.Cor.11.9.
solace vnto him, to participate of his sorrowes, partake of his pleasures, and as a good
yokefellow beare part of his burthen. Of the excellencie of this Structure, I meane of
Women, whose foundation and original of creation, was Gods loue, do I intend to dilate.
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Of Womans Excellency, with the causes of her
creation, and of the sympathie which ought to
be in man and wife each toward other.
T
HE worke of Creation being finished, this approbation thereof was giuen by God himselfe, That All was
very good: If All, then Woman, who, excepting man, is the most excellent
Gen.1.31.
1 Obiect.
2 Obiect.
1.Tim.2.14.
3 Obiect.
1.Cor.7.1.
4 Obiect.
creature vnder the Canopie of heauen. But if it be obiected by any.
First, that woman, though created good, yet by giuing eare to Sathans temptation,
brought death & misery vpon all her posterity.
Secondly, That Adam was not deceived, but that the woman was deceiued, and was in
the transgression.
Thirdly, that Saint Paul saith, It were good for a man not to touch a woman.
Fourthly, and lastly, that of Salomon, who seemes to speake against all of our sex; I haue
found one man of a thousand, but a woman among them all haue I not found, whereof in
it[s] due place.
To the first of these obiections I answere, that Sathan first assailed the woman, because
where the hedge is lowest, most easie it is to get ouer, and she being the weaker vessell was
with more facility to be seduced: Like as a Cristall glasse sooner receiues a cracke then a
strong stone pot. Yet we shall finde the offence of Adam and Eue almost to paralell: For as
an ambitious desire of being made like vnto God, was the motiue which caused her to eate,
so likewise was it his; as may plainely appeare by thatIroni[a],
Eccles.7.30.
Gen.3.11.
Behold, man is become as one of vs: Not that hee was so indeed; but heereby his desire to
attaine a greater perfection than God had giuen him, was reproued. Woman sinned, it is true,
1 Obiect.
by her infidelitie in not beleeuing the Word of God, but giuing credite to Sathans faire
Gen 3.4.
answered.
promises, that shee should not die; but so did the man too: And if Adam had not approoued
of that deed which Eue had done, and beene willing to treade the steps which she had gone,
hee being her Head would haue reproued her, and haue made the commandement a bit to
restraine him from breaking his Makers Iniunction: For if a man burne his hand in the fire, the bellowes that
blowed the fire are not to be blamed, but himselfe rather, for not being carefull to avoyde the danger: Yet if
the bellowes had not blowed, the fire had not burnt; no more is woman simply to bee condemned for mans
transgression; for by the free will, which before his fall hee inioyed, hee might haue auoyded, and beene free
from beeing burnt; or singed with that fire which was kindled by Sathan, and blowne by Eue. It therefore
serued not his turne a whit, afterwardes to say,
The woman which thou gauest mee, gaue mee of the tree; and I did eat: For a penalty was
inflicted vpon him, as well as on the woman, the punishment of her transgression being
particular to her owne sex, and to none but the female kind: but for the sinne of man the
Genesis 3.17.
whole earth was cursed. And he being better able, then the woman, to haue resisted
temptation, because the stronger vessell, was first called to account, to shew, that to whom
much is giuen, of them much is required; and that he who was the soueraigne of all creatures visble, should
haue yeelded greatest obedience to God.
True it is (as is already confessed) that woman first sinned, yet finde wee no mention of spirituall
nakednesse till man had sinned; then
Genesis 3.12.
it is said, Their eyes were opened, the eies of their mind and conscience; and then perceiued
they themselves naked, that is, not onely bereft of that integritie, which they originally had,
but felt the rebellion & disobedience of their members in the disordered motions of their
now corrupt nature, which made them for shame to cover their nakednesse: then (and not afore) it is said that
they saw it, as if sinne were imperfect, and vnable to bring a depriuation of a blessing receiued, or death on all
Genesis 3.7.
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mankind, till man (in whom lay the actiue power of generation) had transgressed. The offence therefore
of Adam and Eue is by Saint Austin thus distinguished, the man sinned against God and himselfe, the woman
against God, her selfe, and her husband: yet in her giuing of the fruit to eate had she no malicious intent
towardes him, but did therein shew a desire to make her husband partaker of that happinesse, which she
thought by their eating they should both haue enioyed. This her giuing Adam of that sawce, wherewith Sathan
had serued her, whose sowrenesse afore he had eaten, she did not perceiue, was that, which made her sinne to
exceede his: wherefore, that
she might not of him, who ought to honour her, be abhorred, the first promise that was made
in Paradise, God makes to woman, that by her Seede should the Serpents head be broken:
whereupon Adam calls her Heuah, life, that as the woman had beene an occasion of his
Genesis 3.15.
sinne, so should she bring foorth the Sauiour from sinne, which was in the fullnesse of time
accomplished; by which was manifested, that he is a Sauiour of beleeuing women, no lesse
Galat.4 4.
then of men, that so the blame of sinne may not be imputed to his creature, which is good;
but to the will by which Euesinned, and yet by Christs assuming the shape of man was it
declared, that his mercie was equiualent to both Sexes; so that by [Heuahs] blessed Seed (as
Saint Paul affirmes) it is brought to passe, that male and female are all one in Christ Iesus.
1 Pet.3.7
To the second obiection I answer, That the Apostle doth not heereby exempt man from
sinne, but onely giueth to vnderstand, that the woman was the primarie transgressour; and
not the man, but that man was not at all deceiued, was farre from his meaning: for he
2 Obiection
afterward expressly saith, that asin Adam all die, so in Christ shall all be made aliue.
answered
For the third obiection, It is good for a man not touch a woman: The Apostle makes it
not a positiue prohibition, but speakes it onelie because of the Corinths present necessitie,
1 Cor.15.22.
who were then persecuted by the enemies of the Church, for which cause, and no other, hee
saith, Art thou loosed from a wife? seeke not a wife: meaning whilst the time of these
3 Obiection
perturbations should continue in their heate; but if thou art bound, seeke not to be loosed: if
answered.
thou marriest, then sinnest not, only increasest thy care: for the married careth for the things
of this world, And I wish that you were without care, that yee might cleaue fast vnto the
Lord without separation: For the time remaineth, that they which haue wiues be as though
1 Cor.7.
they had none: for the persecutors shall depriue you of them, eyther by imprisonment,
banishment, or death; so that manifest it is, that the Apostle doth not heereby forbid
marriage, but onely aduiseth the Corinths to forbeare a while, till God in mercie should curbe the fury of their
aduersaries. For (as Eusebius writeth) Paul was afterward married himselfe, the which is very probable, being
that interrogatiuely he
Galat.3.28.
saith, Haue we not power to leade about a wife, being a sister, as well as the rest of the
Apostles, and as the brethren of the Lord and Cephas?
The fourth and last objection, is that of Salomon, I haue found one man among a
4 Obiect
thousand, but a woman among them all haue I not found: for answere of which, if we looke
answered.
into the storie of his like, wee shall finde therein a Commentary vpon this enigmaticall
Sentence included: for it is there said, that Salomon had seuen hundred wiues, and three
Eccles 7.30.
hundred concubines, which number connexed make one thousand. These women turning his
heart away from being perfect with the Lord his God, sufficient cause had hee to say, that
1 King 11.3
among the said thousand women found he not one vpright. Hee saith not, that among a
thousand women neuer any man found one worthy of commendation, but speakes in the first
person singularly, I haue not found, meaning in his owne experience: for this assertion is to
Pagnine.
be holden a part of the confession his former follies, and no otherwise, his repentance being
the intended drift of Ecclesiastes.
Thus hauing (by Gods assistance) remoued those stones, whereat some haue stumbled, others broken their
shinnes, I will proceede toward the period of my intended taske, which is, to decipher the excellency of
1.Corint.9.5.
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women: of whose Creation I will, for orders sake, obserue; First, the efficient cause, which was God;
Secondly, the materiall cause, or that whereof shee was made; Thirdly, the formall cause, or fashion, and
proportion of her feature; Fourthly and lastly, the finall cause, the end or purpose for which she was made. To
beginne with the first.
The efficient cause of womans creation, was Iehouah the Eternall; the truth of which is manifest
in Moses his narration of the sixe dayes
workes, where he saith, God created them male and female: And David exhorting all the
earth to sing vnto the Lord; meaning, by a Metonimie, earth, all creatures that liue on the
earth, of what nation or Sex soeuer, giues this reason, For the Lord hath made vs.That worke
Psal.100.3.
then can not chuse but be good, yea very good, which is wrought by so excellent a
workeman as the Lord: for he being a glorious Creator, must needes effect a worthie
Psal.100.4.
creature. Bitter water can not proceede from a pleasant sweet fountaine, nor bad worke from
Math.19.17.
that workman which is perfectly good, & in proprietie, none but he.
Secondly, the materiall cause, or matter whereof woman was made, was of a refined
mould, if I may so speake: for man was created of the dust of the earth, but woman was
made of a part of man, after that he was a liuing soule:
Genesis 1.28.
yet was shee not produced from Adams foote, to be his too low inferiour; nor from his head
to be his superiour, but from his side, neare his heart, to be his equall; that where he is Lord,
she may be Lady: and therefore saith God concerning man and woman iointly,Let them rule
Genesis 1.26.
ouer the fish of the Sea, and ouer the foules of the Heauen, and ouer euery beast that moueth
vpon the earth: By which words, he makes their authority equall, and all creatures to be in
subiection vnto them both. This being rightly considered, doth teach men to make such account of their wiues,
as Adam did of Eue, This is bone of my bone, and flesh of my flesh: As also, that they neyther doe or wish
any more hurt vnto them,
Genesis 2.7.
then vnto their owne bodies: for men ought to loue their wiues as themselues, because hee
that loues his wife, loues himselfe: And neuer man hated his owne flesh (which the woman
is) vnlesse a monster in nature.
Ephes.5.28.
Thirdly, the formall cause, fashion, and proportion of woman was excellent: For she was
neyther like the beasts of the earth, foules of the ayre, fishes of the Sea, or any other
inferiour creature, but Man was the onely obiect, which she did resemble. For as God gaue man a lofty
countenance, that hee might looke vp toward Heauen, so did he likewise giue vnto woman. And as the
temperature of mans body is excellent, so is womans. For whereas other Creatures, by reason of their grosse
humours, haue excrements for their habite, as foules, their feathers, beasts, their haire, fishes, their scales,
man and woman onely, haue their
Genesis 2.13.
skinne cleare and smoothe. And (that more is) in the Image of God were they both created;
yea and to be briefe, all the parts of their bodies, both externall and internall, were
correspondent and meete each for other.
Fourthly and lastly, the finall cause, or end, for which woman was made, was to glorifie God, and so be a
collaterall companion for man to glorifie God, in vsing her bodie, and all the parts, powers, and faculties
thereof, as instruments for his honour: As with her voice to sound foorth his prayses; like Meriam, and the rest
of her company; with her tongue not to vtter words of strife, but to giue good councell vnto her husband, the
which hee must not despise. For Abraham was bidden to giue eare to Sarah his wife. Pilate was willed by his
wife
Gen.1.26.
Exod.15.20.
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not to haue anie hand in the condemning of C H R I S T; and a sinne it was in him, that hee
listned not to her: Leah and Rachel councelled Iaacob to do according to the word of the
Lord: and the Shunamite put her husband in mind of harbouring the Prophet Elisha: her
Math.27.19.
hands shold be open according to her abilitie, in contributing towards Gods seruice, and
distressed seruants, like to that poore widdow, which cast two mites into the Treasurie; and
Genesis 31.16 as Marie Magdalen, Susanna, and Ioanna the wife of Herods Steward, with many other,
which of their substance ministred vnto C H R I S T. Her heart should be a receptacle for
2 Kings 4.9.
Gods Word, like Mary that treasured vp the sayings of C H R I S T in her heart. Her feete
should be swift in going to seeke the Lord in his Sanctuarie, as Marie Magdalen made haste
to seeke C R I S T at his Sepulchre. Finally, no power externall or internall ought woman to
Luke 8.
keep idle, but to imploy it in some seruice of G O D, to the glorie of her Creator, and
comfort of her owne soule.
Luke 1.51.
The other end for which woman was made, was to be a Companion and helper for man;
and if she must be an helper, and but an helper, then are those husbands to be blamed, which
Iohn 20.1.
lay the whole burthen of domesticall affaires and maintenance on the shoulders of their
wiues. For, as yoake-fellowes they are to sustayne part of ech others cares, griefs, and
calamities: But as if two Oxen be put in one yoke, the one being bigger than the other, the
greater beares most weight: so the Husband being the stronger vessell is to beare a greater burthen then his
wife; And therefore the Lord said to Adam,
Genesis 21.12
In the sweate of thy face shalt thou eate thy bread, till thou returne to the dust. And
Saint Paulsaith, That he that prouideth not for his household is worse then an Infidel.Nature
hath taught senselesse creatures to helpe one another; as the Male Pigeon, when his Hen is
1. Tim.5.8.
weary with sitting on her egges, and comes off from them, supplies her place, that in her
absence they may receiue no harme, vntill such time as she is fully refreshed. Of small Birds
the Cocke alwaies helpes his Hen to build her nest; and while she sits vpon her egges, he flies abroad to get
meat for her, who cannot then prouide any for her selfe. The crowing Cockrell helpes his Hen to defend her
Chickens from perill, and will indanger himselfe to saue her and them from harme. Seeing then that these
vnreasonable creatures, by the instinct of nature, beare such affection each to other, that without any grudge,
they willingly, according to their kind, helpe one another, I may reason à minore ad maius, that much more
should man and woman, which are reasonable creatures, be helpers each to other in all things lawfull, they
hauing the Law of God to guide them, his Word to bee a Lanthorne vnto their feete, and a Light vnto their
pathes, by which they are excited to a farre more mutuall participation of each others burthen, then other
creatures. So that neither the wife may say to her husband, nor the husband vnto his wife, I haue no need of
thee, no more then the members of the body may so say each to other, betweene whom there is such a
sympathie, that if one member suffer, all suffer with it: Therefore though God bade Abraham forsake his
Countrey and Kindred, yet he bade him not forsake his wife, who being Flesh of his flesh, and bone of his
bone, was to bee
Gen 3.19.
1.Cor.12.21.
Eccles 4.10.
Eccles 4.10.
1.Cor.11.7.
copartner with him of whatsoeuer did betide him[,] whether ioy or sorrow.
Wherefore Salomon saith, Woe to him that is alone; for when thoughts of discomfort,
troubles of this world, and feare of dangers do possesse him, he wants a companion to lift
him vp from the pit of perplexitie, into which hee is fallen: for a good wife, saith Plautus, is
the wealth of the minde, and the welfare of the heart; and therefore a meete associate for her
husband; And Woman, saith Paul, is the glorie of the man.
Marriage is a merri-age, and this worlds Paradise, where there is mutuall loue. Our
blessed Sauiour vouchsafed to honour a marriage with the first miracle that he wrought, vnto
which miracle matrimoniall estate may not vnfitly bee resembled: For as Christ turned water
into
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wine, a farre more excellent liquor; which, as the Psalmist saith,Makes glad the heart of
man; So the single man is by marriage changed from a Batchelour to a Husband, a farre
more excellent title: from a solitarie life vnto a ioyfull vnion and coniunction, with such a
Psal.104.15.
creature as God hath made meete for man, for whom none was meete till she was made. The
enioying of this great blessing madePericles more vnwilling to part from his wife, then to die
for his Countrie; And Antonius Pius to poure forth that patheticall exclamation against death, for depriuing
him of his deerely beloued wife, O cruell hard-hearted death in bereauing mee of her whom I esteemed more
then my own life! A vertuous woman, saith Salomon, is the Crowne of her husband;
Iohn 1.
By which metaphor hee sheweth both the excellencie of such a wife, and what account her
husband is to make of her: For a King doth not trample his Crowne vnder his feete, but
highly esteemes of it, gently handles it, and carefully laies it vp, as the euidence of his
Kingdome; and therefore when David destroyed Rabbah hee tooke off the Crowne from their Kings head: So
husbands should not account their wiues as their vassals, but as those that are heires together of the grace of
life, and with all lenitie and milde perswasions set their feete in the right way, if they happen to tread awry,
bearing with their infirmities, as Elkanah did
Prou.12.4.
with his wiues barrennesse.
The Kingdome of God is compared vnto the marriage of a Kings sonne:Iohn calleth the
coniunction of Christ and his Chosen, a Marriage: And not few, but many times, doth our
1.Pet.2.7.
blessed Sauiour in the Canticles, set forth his vnspeakable loue towards his Church vnder the
title of an Husband reioycing with his Wife; and often vouchsafeth to call her his Sister and
1.Sam.1.17.
Spouse, by which is shewed that with God is no respect of persons, Nations, or Sexes: For
Math.22.
whosoeuer, whether it be man or woman, that doth beleeue in the Lord Iesus,such shall bee
Reu.19.7.
saued. And if Gods loue euen from the beginning, had not beene as great toward woman as
to man, then would hee not haue preserued from the deluge of the old world as many women
Rom.2.11.
as men; nor would Christ after his Resurrection haue appeared vnto a woman first of all
other, had it not beene to declare thereby, that the benefites of his death and resurrection, are
as auailable, by beleefe, for women as for men; for hee indifferently died for the one sex as
Iohn 3:13.
well as the other: Yet a truth vngainesayable is it, that the Man is the womans Head; by
which title yet of Supremacie, no authoritie hath hee giuen him to domineere, or basely
command and imploy his wife, as a seruant; but hereby is he taught the duties which hee oweth
1.Chron.20.2.
1.Cor.11.3.
Ephe.5.23.
Iob 1 4.
Iohn 15.12.
vnto her: For as the head of a man is the imaginer and contriuer of proiects profitable for the
safety of his whole body; so the Husband must protect and defend his Wife from iniuries:
For he is her Head, as Christ is the Head of his Church, which hee entirely loueth, and for
which hee gaue his very life; the deerest thing any man hath in this world; Greater loue then
this hath no man, when he bestoweth his life for his friend, saith our Sauior: This president
passeth all other patternes, it requireth great benignity, and enioyneth an extraordinary
affection, For men must loue their wiues, euen as Christ loued his Church. Secondly, as the
Head doth not iarre or contend with the members, which being many, as the Apostle
saith,yet make but one bodie, no more must the husband with the wife, but
1. Cor.12.20
Col. 3.19.
1. Pet.3.7.
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expelling all bitternesse and cruelty hee must liue with her louingly, and religiously,
honouring her as the weaker vessell. Thirdly, and lastly, as hee is her Head, hee must, by
instruction, bring her to the knowledge of her Creator, that so she may be a fit stone for the
1.Pet.3.18.
Lords building. Women for this end must haue an especiall care to set their affections vpon
such as are able to teach them, that as they grow in yeares, they may grow in grace, and in
the knowledge of Christ Iesus our Lord.
Thus if men would remember the duties they are to performe in being heads, some would not stand a
tiptoe as the doe, thinking themselues Lords & Rulers, and account euery omission of performing whatsoeuer
they command, whether lawfull or not, to be matter of great disparagement, and il dignity done them; whereas
they should consider, that women are enioyned to submite themselues vnto their husbands no other waies then
asthe Lord, so that from hence, for man, ariseth a lesson not to bee forgotten, that as the Lord commandeth no
thing to be done, but that which is right and
1.Cor.14.15.
good, no more must the husband; for if a wife fulfill the euill command of her husband, shee
obeies him as a tempter, as Saphira did Ananias. But least I should seeme too partiall in
praysing women so much as I haue (though no more then warrant from Scripture doth allow)
Actes 5.2.
I adde to the premises, that I say not, all women are vertuous, for then they should be more
excellent then men, sith of Adams sonnes there was Cain as well as Abel, and of Noah,
Cham as well as Sem; so that of men as of women, there are two sorts, namely, good and bad, which
in Mathew the fiue and twenty chapter, are comprehended vnder the name of Sheepe and Goats. And if
women were not sinfull, then should they not need a Sauiour: but the Virgin Mary a patterne of
piety, reioyced in God her Sauoiur: Ergo, she was a sinner. In the Reuelation the Church is called the Spouse
of Christ; and in Zachariah,wickednesse is called a woman, to shew that of women there are both godly and
Ephes.5.
Luke 1.47.
Zech.5.7.
Gen.18.25.
Esay. 5.20.
Prou.17.15.
vngodly: For Christ would not Purge his Floore if there were not Chaffe among the Wheate;
not should gold neede to bee fined, if among it there were no drosse. But farre be it from any
one, to condemne the righteous with the wicked, or good women with the bad (as the Bayter
of women doth:) For though there are some scabbed sheepe in a Flocke, we must not
therefore conclude all the rest to bee mangie: And though some men, through excesse, abuse
Gods creatures, wee must not imagine that all men are Gluutons, the which wee may with as
good reason do, as condemne all women in generall, for the offences of some particulars. Of
the good sort is it that I haue in this booke spoken, and so would I that all that reade should
so vnderstand me: for if otherwise I had done, I should haue incurred that woe, which by the
Prophet Isaiah is pronounced against them that speake well of euill, and should
haue iustified the wicked, which thing is abhominable to the Lord.
The Epilogus or vpshot of the premises.
G
Reat was the vnthankefulnesse of Pharaohs Butler vnto Ioseph: for though hee had done him a great
pleasure, of which the
Butler promised requitall, yet was hee quite forgotten of him: But fare greater is the
ingratitude of those men toward God, that dare presume to speake and exclaime
against Woman, whom God did create for mans comfort. What greater discredit can redound
to a workeman, then to haue the man, for whom hee hath made it, say, it is naught? or what greater discurtesie
can be offered to one, that bestoweth a gift, then to haue the receiuer giue out, that hee cares not for it; For he
needes it not? And what greater ingratitude can be shewed vnto G O D then the opprobrious speeches and
disgracefull inuectiues, which some diabolicall natures doe frame against women?
Gen.40.23.
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Ingratitude is, and alwayes hath beene accounted so odious a vice, thatCicero saith, If one doubt what
name to giue a wicked man, let him call him an vngratefull person, and then hee hath said enough. It was so
detested among the Persians, as that by a Law they prouided, that such should suffer death as felons, which
prooued vnthankefull for any gift receiued. And Loue (saith the Apostle) is the fulfulling of the Lawe:
But where Ingratitude is harbored, there Loue is banished. Let men therefore beware of all
vnthankefulnesse, but especially of the superlatiue ingratitude, that which is towards God,
which is no way more palpably declared, then by the contemning of, and rayling against
women, which sinne, of some men (if to be termed men) no doubt but God will one day auenge,when they
shall plainely perceiue, that it had been better for them to haue been borne dumbe and lame, then to haue vsed
their tongs and hands, the one is repugning, the other in writing against Gods handie worke, their owne flesh,
women I meane, whom God hath made equall with themselues in dignity, both temporally and eternally, if
they continue in the faith: which God for his mercie sake graunt they alwayes may, to the glory of their
Creator, and comfort of their owne soules, through Christ Amen.
Rom.13.10.
To God onely wise be glorie now and for
euer, A M E N.
Certaine
Q V Æ R E S
to the bayter of
Women.
WITH
CONFVTATION
of some part of his Diabolicall Discipline.
[printer's mark]
L O N D O N,
Printed by N.O. Thomas Archer,
and are to be sold at his shop in
Popes-head-Pallace.
1617.
To the Reader.
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Lthough (curteous Reader) I am young in yeares, and more defectiue in knowledge, that
little smattering in Learning, which I haue obtained, being only the fruit of such vacant
houres, as I could spare from affaires befitting my Sex, yet I am not altogether ignorant of
that Analogie which ought to be vsed in a literate Responsarie: But the Beare bayting of
Women, vnto which I haue framed my Apologeticall answere, beeing altogether without
methode, irregular, without Grammaticall Concordance, and a promiscuous mingle mangle,
it would admit no such order to bee observed in the answering thereof, as a regular
Respo[n]sarie requireth.
Wherefore (gentle Reader) fauorably cõsider, that as that Painter is not to be held vnskilfull, which
hauing a deformed Obiect, makes the like portraiture; no more am I iustly to be blamed for my immethodicall
Apologie, sith any iudicious Reader may plainely see, that the Bayter of Women his pestiferous obtrectation
is like a Taylers Cushion, that is botcht together of shreddes, so that, were it not to preuent future infection
with that venome, which he hath, and daily doth sweate out, I would haue beene loath to haue spent time so
idley, as to answere it all: but a crooked pot-lid well enough fits a wrie-neckt pot, an vnfashioned shooe a misshapen foote, and an illiterate answere an vnlearned irreligious prouocation. His absurdities therein
contayned, are so many, that to answere them seuerally, were as friuolous a worke, as to make a Trappe for a
Flea, and as tedious as the pursuite of an Arrow to an impotent man. Yet to preuent his hauing occasion to
say, that I speake of many, but can instance none, I haue thought it meete to present a few of them to his view,
as followeth, that if Follie haue taken roote in him, he may seeke to extirpate it, and to blush at the sight of
that fruit, which he hath already brought foorth; a fruite I call it (not vnfitly I hope) because a Crabbe may be
so termed, as well as a good Apple. Thus, not doubting of the fauour of well affected, and of their kinde
acceptance of my indeuours, of which I desire not applaud, but approbation: I rest,
Your friend,
R A C H E L S P E G H T.
The Preface vnto the
Subseq[u]ent.
Ith edged tooles (saith the old Prouerbe) it is ill sporting, but farre more dangerous: yea
damnable is it to dally with Scripture, the two-edged Sword of the Eternall: for so to doe is
a breach of the third Commandement; and he that failes in one point, is guiltie of all. If the
magnitude of this sinne had beene considered by the Bayter of Women, the lamentable, yet
iust reward thereof, as of all other sinnes without repentance, would, if he had but a seruile
feare, haue restrained
him from transgressing herein. But as one deuoide of all true feare of Gods indignation
against wilfull sinners (for as ignorance doth somewhat extenuate a fault, so doth knowledge
much aggrauate it) he hath made the exordium of his brainesicke exhalation against women,
Iames 2.10.
to be a peruerting of a part of holy writ; ex vnguibus leonem, iudge of this Lion by his pawe.
For if the fore foot be monstrous, doubtlesse the whole bodie is correspondent thereto. The
Porch indeede is foule, but hee that viewes the sequel, as I haue done, shall find a laystall of heathenish
Assertions, Similies, and Examples, illiterate composition, irreligious inuectiues, and (which is worst)
impious blasphemies therein included, filthy rubbish, more fitte to be heaped vp by a Pagan, then one that
beareth the name of a Christian.
But lest it should not onely be thought; but also said, that I finde fault where none is; or that I do ill to
mislike the Worke, and not make the Author therewith acquainted, that if he please, hee may answer for
Hebr.4.12.
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himselfe: I thinke it not amisse to propose some few Quæres vnto the Bayter of Women, which I haue
abstracted out of his infamous Booke, as himselfe confesseth it to be in his Epistle to Women.
[headpiece]
Certaine Quæres to the Bayter
of women, with confutation of
some part of his Diabolicall
Discipline.
F it bee true, asse you affirme, Pag .2. line 26. That women will not giue thankes for a good
turne.
I demand whether Deborah and Hannah were not women, who both of them sang
hymnes of thankesgiuing vnto the Lord; the one for his mercy in granting her victory
ouer Israelsenemies, the other for his fauourable giuing vnto her a son, which she full oft
and earnestly had desired?
And where-asse you say, Page 4. line 22. that
Iudg.5.
1 Sam.1.11.
&2.1
1 Sam.25.3.
Gen.14.16.18.
Math 12.25.
a woman that hath a faire face, it is euer matched with a cruel heart, and her heauenly lookes
with hellish thoughts: You therein shew your selfe a contradictor of Scriptures presidents:
For Abigail was a beautifull woman, and tenderhearted; Rebekah was both faire of face and
pittiful. Many examples seruing to confute your vniuersall rule might bee produced, but
these are sufficient to dispell this your cloud of vntruth. As for your audacitie in iudging of
womens thoughts, you thereby shew your selfe an vsurper against the King of heauen, the
true knowledge of cogitatons being appropriate vnto him alone.
If your assertion, That A woman is better lost then found, better forsaken then
taken (Page 5. line 4.) be to be credited, me thinkes, great pitty it is, that afore you were
borne, there was none so wise as to counsell your father not to meddle with a woman, that
hee might haue escaped those troubles, which you affirme, that all married men are cumbred
with, Page 2. line 20. As also that hee might not haue begotten such a monster in
nature Asse your selfe, who (like the Priest which forgot he was Parish Clearke) defame and
exclaime against women, as though your selfe had neuer had a mother, or you neuer beene a
child.
You affirme (Page 10. line 18.) that for the Loue of women, Dauid purchased the displeasure of his
God: It had beene good that you had cited the place of story where you finde it, For I neuer yet in Scripture
read, that the Almighty was displeased with Dauid for his loue to women, but for his lust toBathsheba, which
afterward brought forth his adulterous act, and his causingVriah to be murthered.
In saying (Page 10. line. 25.) that Iobs wife counselled her husband to curse God, you
misconster the Text; for the true construction thereof will shew it to bee
a Scarcasmus or Ironicall speech, and not an instigation to blasphemie.
Page 11. line 8. you count it wonderfull to see the mad feates of women, for shee will now bee merry, then
sad: but me thinkes it is farre more wonder-fooleto haue one, that aduentures to make his Writing as publique
as an In-keepers Signe, which hangs to the view of all passengers, to want Grammaticall Concordance in his
said Writing, and ioyne together Women plurall, and sheesingular, Asse you not onely in this place, but also
in others haue done.
Albeit the Scripture verifieth, that God made woman and brought her to man; and that a prudent wife
commeth of the Lord: yet haue
1.Sam.11.
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you not feared blasphemously to say, that women sprung from the diuell, Page 15. line 26.
But being, as it seemes, defectiue in that whereof you haue much need (for mendacem
oportet esse memorem) you suddainely after say, That women were created by God and
formed by nature, and therefore by policie and wisedome to be auoyded, Page 16. line 12.
An impious conclusion to inferre, that because God created, therefore to be auoyded: Oh intollerable
absurdity!
Men I say may liue without women, but women cannot liue without men,Page 14. line 18. If any
Religious Author had thus affirmed, Ishould haue wondred, that vnto Satans suggestions he had so much
subiected himselfe, as to crosse the Almighties prouidence and care for mans good, who positiuely said,It is
not good for man
Gen 2.22.
Prou.19.14.
to bee alone; But being that the sole testimony heereof is your owne dico, I maruell no whit
at the errour, but heartily wish, that vnto all the vntruths you haue vttered in your infamous
booke, you had subscribed your Dico, that none of them might bee adiudged truths:
For mendacis præmium est verbis eius non adhiberi fidem.
Page 17. line 5. you affirme, that Hosea was brought vnto Idolatrie by marrying with a lewd
woman, which is as true as the sea burnes: and for proofe thereof you cite Hosea I. in which chapter is no
such matter to be found, it onely containing a declaration of the Lords anger against the adulterous Iewes,
who had gone a whoring after other Gods, set forth in a parable of an husband and an adulterous wife.
Page 19. Theodora a monstrous strumpet, Lauia, Floria, and Lais, were three notable Curtizans.
Was not that noble Citie of Troy, sacked and spoyled for the faire Helena?Page 21. Therefore stay not
alone in the company of a woman, trusting to thy owne chastity, except thou bee more strong
then Sampson, more wise thenSalomon, or more holy then David, for these, and many more haue beene
ouercome by the sweete intisements of women, Page 22.
I may as well say Barrabas was a murtherer, Ioab killed Ab[n]er andAmasa, and Pharaoh
Necho slew Iosiah, therefore stay not alone in the
Gen.2.15.
companie of a man, trusting to thy owne strength, except thou bee stronger then Iosiah, and
more valiant then Abner and Amasa, for these and many more haue beene murthered by
men. The forme of argumentation is your owne, the which if you dislike, blame your selfe
2.Sam.3.27
for proposing such a patterne, and blush at your owne folly,Quod te posse non facile
2 Sam.20 10.
credo: for it is an old saying, how true I know not, that blushing is a signe of grace.
2 King 23.29.
Page 31. line 15. If God had not made women onely to bee a plague to man, hee would
neuer haue called them necessarie. euils. Albeit I haue not readSeaton or Ramus, nor so
much as seene (though heard of) Aristotles Arganox,yet by that I haue seene and reade in compasse of my
apprehension, I will aduenture to frame an argument or two, to shew what danger, for this your blasphemy
[you] are in.
To fasten a lie vpon God is blasphemy: But the Bayter of women fastens a lie vpon
God: ergo, the Bayter is a blasphemer.
The Proposition, I trowe, none will gaine say, the assumption I thus proue,
Whosoeuer affirmes God to haue called women necessary euils, fastens a lie vpon God: For from the
beginning of Genesis to the end of the Reuelation is no such instance to be found: But the Bayter affirmes
God to haue called women,Ergo, the Bayter fastens a lie vpon God.
Luke 23.19.
The reward according to Law Diuine due
vnto the Bayter of women.
Whosoeuer blasphemeth God, ought by his Law, to die; The Bayter of Women hath blasphemed
God, Ergo, he ought to die the death.
The proposition is vpon record, Leuit. 24.14.16. The Assumption is formerly proued.
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If thou marryest a still and a quiet woman, that will seeme to thee that thou ridest but an ambling horse to
hell, but if with one that is froward and vnquiet, then thou wert as good ride a trotting horse to the diuell.Page
35. Line 13.
If this your affirmation be true, then seemes it, that hell is the period of all married mens trauailes, and the
center of their circumference. A man can but haue either a good wife or a bad; and if he haue the former, you
say he doth but seeme to amble to hell; if the latter, he were as good trot to the diuell: But if married men ride,
how trauaile Batchelours? surely, by your rule they must go on foote, because they want wiues; which
(inclusiuely) you say are like horses to carry their husbands to hell. Wherefore in my minde, it was not
without mature consideration that you married in time, because it would be too irksome for you to trauaile so
tedious a journey on foote.
Now the fire is kindled, let vs burne this other faggot. Page 38. line 4.
Beware of making too great a fire, lest the surplussage of that fires effect which you intended for others,
singe your selfe.
Shee will make thee weare an Oxe feather in thy Cappe. Page 44. line 4.
If Oxen haue feathers, their haires more fitly may be so termed then their hornes.
Page 50. line 28. There is no ioy nor pleasure in this world which may be compared to Marriage,for if the
husband be poore and in aduersitie, then hee beares but the one halfe of the griefe: and furthermore, his wife
will comfort him, with all the comfortable meanes she can deuise.
Page 51. line 16. Many are the ioyes and sweete pleasures in Marriage, as in our children, &c.
Page 34. line 5. There are many troubles comes galloping at the heeles of a woman. If thou wert a Seruant,
or in bondage afore, yet when thou marriest, thy toyle is neuer the nearer ended, but euen then, and not before,
thou changest thy golden life, which thou didst leade before (in respect of the married) for a droppe of hony,
which quickely turnes to be as bitter as wormewood.
Page 53. line 19. The husband ought (in signe of loue) to impart his secrets and counsell vnto his wife, for
many haue found much comfort and profite by taking their wiues counsell; and if thou impart any ill happe to
thy wife, shee lighteneth thy griefe, either by comforting thee louingly, or else, in bearing a part thereof
patiently.
Page 41. line 12. If thou vnfouldest any thing of secret to a woman, the more thou chargest her to keepe it
close, the more shee will seeme, as it were, with childe, till shee haue reuealed it.
It was the saying of a iudicious Writer, that whoso makes the fruit of his cogitations extant to the view of
all men, should haue his worke to be as a well tuned Instrument, in all places according and agreeing, the
which I am sure yours doth not: For how reconcile you those dissonant places aboue cited? or how make you
a consonant diapason of those discords wanting harmony?
Page 34. line 19. You counsell all men, to shunne idlenesse, and yet the first words of your Epistle to
Women are these, musing with my selfe being idle:Heerein you appeare, not vnlike vnto a Fencer, which
teacheth another how to defend himselfe from enemies blowes, and suffers himselfe to be stricken without
resistance: for you warne others, to eschew that dangerous vice, wherewith (by your owne confession) your
selfe is stained.
Page 57. line 5. If thou like not my reasons to expell loue, then thou mayest trie Ouids Art, for he
counsells those that feele this horrible heate to coole their flames with hearbes which are colde of nature as
Rew, &c.
Albeit you doubt not but by some to be reputed for a good Archer, yet heere you shot wide from the truth,
in saying without contradiction of Ouids errour, that Rew is of a cold nature: For most Physitions (if not all)
both ancient and moderne, holde it to be hote and drie in the third degree: and experience will tell the vser
thereof, that the temperature is hote, not colde. And though the sense of tasting, without further triall, doth
repell this errour, I doubt not but in citing this prescription, you haue verified the opinion of that philosopher,
which said, That there are some, who thinke they speake wisest, and write most iudiciously, when they
vnderstand not themselues.
But, vt opus ad finem per ducam, sith I haue trode my vtmost intended steppe, though left one path
vngone, I meane the Beare bayting of Widdowesvnviewd, in that I am ignorant of their dispositions,
accounting it a follie of me to talke of Robin-hood, as many doe, that neuer shot in his Bowe, I leaue the
speculation (with approbation of their Beare bayting) to those that regard neyther affabilitie nor humanitie,
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and wishing vnto euery such Misogunes, aTiburne Tiffenie for curation of his swolne necke, which onely
through a Cynicall inclination will not indure the yoke of lawfull Matrimony, I bid farewell.
F
I
N
I
S
ret, fume or frump at me who will, I care not,
will thrust forth thy sting to hurt, and spare not:
ow that the taske I vndertooke is ended,
dread not any harme to me intended,
ith iustly none herein haue I offended.
Pag. 7 line 7. for Herods reade Heuahs.
[printers ornament]
http://www.luminarium.org/renascence-editions/rachel.html
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How climate change dries up mountain streams
April 12, 2016
Source:
University of Utah
Summary:
The western United States relies on mountain snow for its water supply. Water stored as snow in the
mountains during winter replenishes groundwater and drives river runoff in spring, filling reservoirs
for use later in summer. But how could a warming globe and a changing climate interrupt this
process?
FULL STORY
Climate change can affect mountain streams in two major ways: By raising the overall temperature,
increasing evapotranspiration, and by shifting the precipitation from snow to rain. Both impacts could
significantly alter the amount of water in a stream watershed and the amount that reaches cities downstream.
Credit: © Pavel Klimenko / Fotolia
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The western United States relies on mountain snow for its water supply. Water stored as snow in the
mountains during winter replenishes groundwater and drives river runoff in spring, filling reservoirs for use
later in summer. But how could a warming globe and a changing climate interrupt this process?
In a new study in Environmental Research Letters, a team of hydrologists that includes University of Utah
professor Paul Brooks answers that question by simulating isolated climate change effects on Rocky
Mountain stream systems, varying the type of precipitation (rain vs. snow) and the amount of energy
(temperature) in the system. The answer, they found, depends less on how water enters the stream watershed,
and more on how it leaves.
Balancing the water budget
Hydrologists often construct water budgets to account for all the ways water enters and leaves a system. In the
case of a mountain stream, water enters as precipitation but only a portion of this water leaves as streamflow.
Much of this melt water enters soils. Here it can be used by plants or evaporate directly, with water loss from
both processes combined called evapotranspiration. The water can also recharge groundwater and enter the
stream later in the year. And it matters whether the precipitation falls as snow or as rain.
Climate change can affect mountain streams in two major ways: By raising the overall temperature,
increasing evapotranspiration, and by shifting the precipitation from snow to rain. Both impacts could
significantly alter the amount of water in a stream watershed and the amount that reaches cities downstream.
So why try to separate the influence of the two factors? "As the climate becomes increasingly more variable,
we need to provide water resource managers with specific guidance on how individual warm or wet years,
which may not coincide, will influence water supply," said Brooks.
Simulated streams
The team, led by doctoral student Lauren Foster at Colorado School of Mines, constructed models of two
Colorado stream watersheds on both sides of the continental divide. The researchers simulated the
atmospheric conditions of a typical water year, but then applied 11 simulations of various temperature
alterations to see how the watersheds responded.
In baseline scenarios, without any temperature alteration, the streams behaved as expected, with a swell in
streamflow during snowmelt. During snowmelt and into summer, meltwater recharged the underlying aquifer,
which then sustained streamflow through the fall and winter.
When precipitation was changed from snow to rain, the stream system became "flashier," the team writes,
with the water that would have been stored as snow running off into the stream faster. Overall streamflow in
this scenario decreased by 11 percent in the watershed east of the continental divide and by 18 percent west of
the divide. But warming the systems by 4 degrees Celsius resulted in more evapotranspiration, enough that
groundwater had to support streamflow an entire season earlier, beginning in summer rather than in fall.
Streamflow reduced by 19 percent in the east watershed and 23 percent in the west, suggesting that warmer
temperatures may have more impact on streams than a transition from snow to rain.
"Changes in energy, which result in changes in evapotranspiration, outweighed the changes in the form of
precipitation," said Reed Maxwell of Colorado School of Mines.
The effects of these two climate change effects may vary with location, the team writes, and the results need
to be checked against real-life environments. But the researchers' work helps to make sense of the noisiness in
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climate data and helps scientists gain a clearer picture of the future of water, especially in the mountainous
west.
Story Source:
The above post is reprinted from materials provided by University of Utah.Note: Materials may be edited for
content and length.
Journal Reference:
1.
Lauren M Foster, Lindsay A Bearup, Noah P Molotch, Paul D Brooks, Reed M Maxwell. Energy budget
increases reduce mean streamflow more than snow–rain transitions: using integrated modeling to isolate
climate change impacts on Rocky Mountain hydrology.Environmental Research Letters, 2016; 11 (4): 044015
DOI:10.1088/1748-9326/11/4/044015
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/04/160412211608.htm
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Crackdown in China: Worse and Worse
Orville Schell
APRIL 21, 2016 ISSUE
China Daily/Reuters
Chinese Communist Party General Secretary Xi Jinping, right, with Wang Qishan, who has been a major
force in the recent crackdown as secretary of the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI), at the
National People’s Congress, Beijing, March 2015
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“As a liberal, I no longer feel I have a future in China,” a prominent Chinese think tank head in the process of
moving abroad recently lamented in private. Such refrains are all too familiar these days as educated Chinese
professionals express growing alarm over their country’s future. Indeed, not since the 1970s when Mao still
reigned and the Cultural Revolution still raged has the Chinese leadership been so possessed by Maoist
nostalgia and Leninist-style leadership.
As different leaders have come and gone, China specialists overseas have become accustomed to reading
Chinese Communist Party (CCP) tea leaves as oscillating cycles of political “relaxation” and “tightening.”
China has long been a one-party Leninist state with extensive censorship and perhaps the largest secret police
establishment in the world. But what has been happening lately in Beijing under the leadership of Chinese
Communist Party General Secretary Xi Jinping is no such simple fluctuation. It is a fundamental shift in
ideological and organizational direction that is beginning to influence both China’s reform agenda and its
foreign relations.
At the center of this retrograde trend is Xi’s enormously ambitious initiative to purge the Chinese Communist
Party of what he calls “tigers and flies,” namely corrupt officials and businessmen both high and low. Since it
began in 2012, the campaign has already netted more than 160 “tigers” whose rank is above or equivalent to
that of the deputy provincial or deputy ministerial level, and more than 1,400 “flies,” all lower-level
officials.1 But it has also morphed from an anticorruption drive into a broader neo-Maoist-style mass purge
aimed at political rivals and others with differing ideological or political views.
To carry out this mass movement, the Party has mobilized its unique and extensive network of surveillance,
security, and secret police in ways that have affected many areas of Chinese life. Media organizations dealing
with news and information have been hit particularly hard. Pressured to conform to old Maoist models
requiring them to serve as megaphones for the Party, editors and reporters have found themselves increasingly
constrained by Central Propaganda Department diktats. Told what they can and cannot cover, they find that
the limited freedom they had to report on events has been drastically curtailed.
The consequences of running afoul of government orders have become ever more grave. Last August, for
instance, a financial journalist for the weekly business magazine Caijing was detained after reporting on
government manipulation of China’s stock markets and forced to denounce his own coverage in a humiliating
self-confession on China Central Television (CCTV). And more recently media outlets were reminded in the
most explicit way not to stray from the Party line when Xi himself dropped by the New China News Agency,
the People’s Daily, and CCTV.
“All news media run by the Party [which includes every major media outlet in China] must work to speak for
the Party’s will and its propositions, and protect the Party’s authority and unity,” Xi warned. In front of a
banner declaring “CCTV’s family name is ‘the Party,’” Xi urged people who work in the media to “enhance
their awareness to align their ideology, political thinking, and deeds to those of the CCP Central Committee.”
Then, only days later the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology announced new regulations
banning all foreign-invested media companies from publishing online in China without government approval.
But the crackdown has hardly been limited to the media. Hundreds of crosses have been ripped from the
steeples of Christian churches, entire churches have been demolished, pastors arrested, and their defense
lawyers detained and forced to make public confessions. And even as civil society has grown over the past
few decades, a constraining new civil society law is now being drafted that promises to put NGOs on notice
against collaborating with foreign counterparts or challenging the government.
At the same time, independent-minded researchers at think tanks and outspoken professors at universities
worry about the “chilling effect” of Xi’s policies on academic life in both China and Hong Kong. Feminist
activists demonstrating against sexual harassment have been arrested for “picking quarrels and provoking
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trouble,” while human rights lawyers have been swept up in a mass wave of arrests for “creating public
disorder,” and even for “subverting state power.”
But what has been perhaps most unexpected about this trend is the way that Beijing has begun to extend its
claim to control people and organizations beyond its borders. Despite its stubborn defense of the sanctity of
sovereignty, its agents have begun reaching overseas to manipulate the foreign dialogue by setting up
hundreds of Confucius Institutes, newspapers, magazines, and even TV networks that answer to the Central
Propaganda Department and the CCP.
The Chinese government is also denying visas to “unfriendly” (buyouhao) foreign journalists and scholars;
blocking foreign websites with which it disagrees; demanding that public figures like the Dalai Lama, Hong
Kong activists, or Chinese dissidents be refused foreign platforms; threatening the advertising bases of
overseas media outlets that challenge its positions; and now even abducting foreign nationals abroad and
“renditioning” them back to China where it forces them into making televised confessions. It is hardly
surprising that Chinese have started whispering about a new “climate of fear” (kongbude qifen), what Eva Pils
of King’s College London School of Law calls “rule by fear.”
What is most striking about these new tactics is their boldness and unrepentant tone. Instead of denying or
apologizing for them, the CCP seems to proudly proclaim them as part of a new Chinese model of
development, albeit one that has no use for liberal values from the West. In the new world of resurgent
Chinese wealth and power, what is valued is strong leadership, short-term stability, and immediate economic
growth.
Sitting at the very epicenter of this new nationwide campaign to more tightly control and rejuvenate China
through a combination of more muscular leadership, regimented thought, and deeper loyalty to Xi is the
Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI). Long one of the Party’s most powerful, secretive, and
feared internal organs, the CCDI is dedicated to “maintaining Party discipline.” But when Xi came to power
and appointed Vice-Premier and Politburo Standing Committee member Wang Qishan as its secretary, he also
charged it with launching an unprecedented new anticorruption campaign.
Wang is the “princeling” son-in-law of former Vice-Premier Yao Yilin. The son of a university professor and
himself a student of history, he has headed up the China Construction Bank and also creatively handled
China’s financial and commercial affairs under Hu Jintao when he worked closely with US Secretary of the
Treasury Henry Paulson to guide the early years of the Strategic and Economic Dialogue between the US and
China. That period is looked back on as a particularly constructive one between the US and China. Why
Wang gave up this portfolio to become an anonymous grand inquisitor is unknown, but his friendship with Xi,
formed when both were “sent down” (xiafang) as youths to the same dirt-poor region of Shaanxi province in
the early 1970s, may help explain his willingness.
According to Li Ling of the University of Vienna, who has written about the CCDI, “the party disciplinary
system was and remains primarily a means for consolidating the authority of the Party Central Committee and
preserving party unity.”2 But since Wang took over in 2012, its already significant network of twelve branch
offices have along with the Central Commission expanded their number of investigations from twenty in 2013
to more than a hundred in 2016 to make it one of the most important organs in Xi’s effort to bolster China’s
one-party system. Its work is considered so important that it is even allowed to hire and fire outside the
Organization Department, the centralized clearing house that controls other high-level appointments.
As an old-style Leninist party in a modern world, the CCP is confronted by two major challenges: first, how
to maintain “ideological discipline” among its almost 89 million members in a globalized world awash with
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money, international travel, electronically transmitted information, and heretical ideas. Second, how to
cleanse itself of its chronic corruption, a blight that Xi has himself described as “a matter of life and death.”
Lan Hongguang/Xinhua/Eyevine/Redux
Xi Jinping, center, meeting with representatives and descendants of revolutionary martyrs in Nanchang,
Jiangxi province, during a trip over the Lunar New Year that also included a pilgrimage to Jinggangshan,
Mao’s first revolutionary base, February 2016
The primary reason the Party is so susceptible to graft is that while officials are poorly paid, they do control
valuable national assets. So, for example, when property development deals come together involving real
estate (all land belongs to the government) and banking (all the major banks also belong to the government),
officials vetting the deals find themselves in tempting positions to supplement their paltry salaries by
accepting bribes or covertly raking off a percentage of the action. Since success without corruption in China is
almost a non sequitur, officials and businessmen (and heads of state-owned enterprises are both) are all easily
touched by what Chinese call “original sin” (yuanzui), namely, some acquaintance with corruption.
Although secret investigations, censorship, and political trials are nothing new in China, what is unique about
the CCDI’s part in Xi’s anticorruption campaign is its explicitly extrajudicial status. The investigations it
launches take clear precedence over the judicial processes that police, lawyers, and judges would normally
carry out in democratic societies. The CCDI is unencumbered by any such legal niceties, except when show
trials are needed at the very end of a case so that a formal sentence for, say, corruption, can seem to have been
delivered “according to law,” a phrase the CCPtirelessly uses as if incantation alone could make it true. But
by then, of course, “guilt” has long since been established and all that is usually needed is a little legal theater
to give the CCDI’s investigation an air of legitimacy.
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Besides investigating corruption and violations of “Party discipline,” the CCDI has one other more nebulous
charge: to “achieve an intimidating effect” on wrongdoing, as its website described it in 2014. In other words,
it hopes “by killing a few chickens to frighten the monkeys” (xiaji jinghou), as the ancient adage puts it, in
hopes of discouraging other potential malefactors. The commission has even launched a new website and
smartphone app that allows whistle-blowers to upload incriminating photographs and videos of officials
caught violating new sumptuary rules or even in flagrante delicto.
As if the CCDI’s own investigative arm, the Discipline Inspection Supervision Office (Jijian jianchashi), was
not up to the ambition of Xi’s purge, the Party has now also breathed new life into a second organ, the Central
Inspection Patrolling Group (CIPG,xunshizu). It was originally set up in 2003 to investigate “leading cadres”
whom theCCDI may have shielded owing to its own nepotism and cronyism. With each of their teams headed
by a retired ministry-level official and reporting to the Central Committee’s new “Central Leadership
Inspection Work Leading Group,” the CIPG has grown quickly into an important and feared investigatory
unit within China’s already extensive security apparatus. Although it technically reports directly to the Party
Central Committee, like the CCDI, its day-to-day activities are under the command of Wang Qishan, making
him the capo di tutt’i capi of China’s secretive investigations units.
When a “tiger or fly” comes under suspicion by either investigative branch, the suspect can be detained for
what is called “double designation” (shuanggui), meaning that they give themselves up for investigation at a
designated time and place, but only by theCCDI. Kept in isolation—often under an around-the-clock suicide
watch by multiple “accompanying protectors”—there are only murky limitations on the length of time a
suspect can be held and no provisions for habeas corpus, legal counsel, or appeal. The object of shuanggui,
according to the scholar Li Ling, “is to destroy the detainees’ psychological defense system so that he or she
will ‘start to talk.’” Although some reform measures have recently been taken, in the past forced confession
and physical abuse, even torture and death, have not been uncommon. Because any investigation comes with
strong presumptions of guilt, shuanggui is usually as much a verdict as the start of an evidentiary process.
Needless to say, few things strike more terror in the hearts of officials than news that they, or their “work
unit” (danwei), are on the CCDI’s hit list.
“The CCDI’s anticorruption campaign is chillingly evocative of the draconian repressions launched by the
Eastern Depot during the Ming dynasty,” one historically minded corporate consultant told me. She was
referring to a period in imperial history that represented a high tide of Chinese despotism. As most Chinese
know from histories, popular novels, and TV dramas, the Ming dynasty was characterized by factionalism,
intrigue, paranoia, intimidation, fratricide, and extrajudicial ruthlessness. Trusting no one and fearing treason
everywhere, the Yongle Emperor (reigning 1402–1424) sought to protect the throne with an elaborate
network of internal surveillance and espionage.
When, like Xi Jinping, the Ming emperor decided that his existing security apparatus, the so-called
“Embroidered Guard” (jinyiwei), was inadequate to the task of protecting his reign against subversion, he set
up the infamous “Eastern Depot” (dongchang) and put it under the leadership of loyal palace eunuchs. Here
secret files were maintained on all officials, just as today’s “dossier” (dangan) system keeps files on
contemporary Chinese. With its epic history of forced confessions, torture, and grisly assassinations, this
Ming dynasty security apparatus became a “diabolical force behind the throne,” writes historian Shih-shan
Henry Tsai, “a monstrous secret police apparatus” whose “power grew like a giant octopus, extending to
every corner of the empire.”
However, so rife with paranoia was the Ming court that later emperors came to distrust even the “Eastern
Depot” and so set up the “Western Depot” (xichang) as well, yet another security organ outside of regular
bureaucratic channels. The proliferation of security organizations under Xi Jinping today is hauntingly
suggestive of this Ming precursor.
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Moving away from the “consensus-style leadership” that came to distinguish China since Mao’s repressive
rule, Xi Jinping has not only recentralized power, but just as Ming emperors abolished the position of prime
minister, he has marginalized the position of the modern-day premier. Instead, he has set up a series of new
“leading small groups” (lingdao xiaozu) and made himself head of the most important ones (covering such
fields as military reorganization, cyberhacking, economic reform, maritime rights, etc.). More than primus
inter pares, Xi has become what Party propaganda organs now grandly tout as the “core” (hexin) of the Party.
As a well-known Chinese cultural figure recently complained in private, “Our leadership now has an indelibly
‘dictatorial personality’ (ducaide xingge).”
As popular as Xi’s battle against corruption has been among ordinary people—a 2014 Harvard study showed
him as having the highest approval ratings of any world leader—it has had an undeniably chilling effect on
anyone hoping to speak truthfully to power. And with its evolution from an anti-corruption drive to a far
broader purge of political and ideological rivals, many fear that China is now regressing into a period of neoMaoism.
Such fears were only reinforced when over the New Year’s holiday Xi made a televised pilgrimage to
Jinggangshan where Mao had set up his first revolutionary base in 1927. Here Xi was seen paternalistically
“at one with the masses,” sharing a meal with peasants in front of a reverential poster of Chairman Mao. And
his trip has generated a great many photographs, news clips, fawning pop tunes, and videos all extolling the
benevolence of “Uncle Xi” (Xi dada).
Then in late February, he ordered a yearlong socialist education campaign, especially designed for those
comrades who might be experiencing “wavering confidence in communism.” He particularly recommended
careful study of Mao’s 1949 essay “Methods of Work for Party Committees.”
The notion that the “Mao Zedong Thought” that had dominated the Cultural Revolution would ever make a
comeback in China had long seemed as unlikely as it was unwelcome. But now that China is sliding
ineluctably backward into a political climate more reminiscent of Mao Zedong in the 1970s than Deng
Xiaoping in the 1980s, more and more educated Chinese are making allusions to such frightening periods of
Chinese history as the Cultural Revolution and the Ming dynasty. And more and more of them are also
seeking to financially anchor themselves abroad by finding ways to park assets outside their country, making
it hardly surprising that China has been hemorrhaging foreign currency, with $1 trillion said to have fled the
country last year alone.
When in 1978 the twice-purged Deng returned to power to lay out an ambitious reform agenda that allowed
post-Mao China to enjoy greater liberalization in both its economic and political life, there was great relief.
And during the relatively tolerant decade that followed, prior to Tiananmen Square in 1989, it was possible to
imagine that with the passage of time China would not only become more market-oriented, politically open,
and committed to the rule of law, but more in the world. Such optimism was only reinforced by such notions
as China’s “peaceful rise” propounded later under Hu Jintao.
However, since Xi Jinping’s investiture such roseate hopes of a China slowly evolving away from its Leninist
past have become increasingly remote. Indeed, in recent weeks, just as China’s annual “Two Meetings” (the
National People’s Congress and the People’s Political Consultative Congress) were being held in Beijing,
Xi’s efforts to command greater Party discipline and to censor the media began to provoke surprising levels of
popular protest, including a flurry of unprecedented public challenges to both his policies and authority posted
on the Internet. For example, an open letter by New China News Agency reporter Zhou Fang criticized
censors for their “crude” and “extreme” violations of online freedom of expression. “Under the crude rule of
the Internet control authorities,” Zhou wrote, “online expression has been massively suppressed and the
public’s freedom of expression has been violated to an extreme degree.”
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Zhou’s letter spread like wildfire online before being taken down by censors. Another online letter appeared
in the government-linked news site “Watching” (Wujie). It was signed by an anonymous group labeling
themselves as “loyal Communist Party members” and not only accused Xi of launching “a cult of
personality,” but publicly urged him to step down from office. “You do not possess the capabilities to lead the
Party and the nation into the future,” it declared.
His authoritarian style of leadership at home and belligerent posture abroad are ominous because they make
China’s chances of being successful in reforming its own economy—on which the entire world now
depends—increasingly unlikely. At the same time, because they seem bound to make the Party more
dependent on nationalism and xenophobia, Xi’s policies also seem destined to prevent Beijing from being
able to recast its inflamed relations with its neighbors around the South and East China seas. Finally, because
such policies also grow out of a deeply paranoid view of the democratic world, they make it extremely
difficult for China to effectively cooperate with countries like the US on crucial areas of common interests
such as antiterrorism, climate change, pandemics, and nuclear proliferation.
Whatever may come, China is undergoing a retrograde change that will require every person, business, and
country dealing with it to make a radical reassessment of its willingness to seek convergence with the rest of
the world.
1.
1
See Susan Jakes, “Visualizing China’s Anti-Corruption Campaign,” ChinaFile.com, January 21, 2016. ↩
2.
2
Li Ling, “The Rise of the Discipline and Inspection Commission,
1927–2012: Anticorruption
Investigation and Decision-Making in the Chinese Communist Party,” Modern China, February 16,
2016. ↩
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/04/21/crackdown-in-china-worse-and-worse/
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The pyrophilic primate
April 12, 2016
Source:
University of Utah
Summary:
Fire, a tool broadly used for cooking, constructing, hunting and even communicating, was arguably
one of the earliest discoveries in human history. But when, how and why it came to be used is hotly
debated among scientists. A new scenario crafted by anthropologists proposes that human ancestors
became dependent on fire as a result of Africa's increasingly fire-prone environment 2-3 million
years ago.
FULL STORY
Anthropogenic burning in Hadza country.
Credit: James F. O'Connell
Fire, a tool broadly used for cooking, constructing, hunting and even communicating, was arguably one of the
earliest discoveries in human history. But when, how and why it came to be used is hotly debated among
scientists.
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A new scenario crafted by University of Utah anthropologists proposes that human ancestors became
dependent on fire as a result of Africa's increasingly fire-prone environment 2-3 million years ago.
As the environment became drier and natural fires occurred more frequently, ancestral humans took
advantage of these fires to more efficiently search for and handle food. With increased resources and energy,
these ancestors were able to travel farther distances and expand to other continents.
The study was funded by the National Science Foundation and the findings were published April 10, 2016
in Evolutionary Anthropology.
Serendipitous science
Current prevailing hypotheses of how human ancestors became fire-dependent depict fire as an accident -- a
byproduct of another event rather than a standalone occurrence. One hypothesis, for example, explains fire as
a result of rock pounding that created a spark and spread to a nearby bush.
"The problem we're trying to confront is that other hypotheses are unsatisfying. Fire use is so crucial to our
biology, it seems unlikely that it wasn't taken advantage of by our ancestors," said Kristen Hawkes,
distinguished professor of anthropology at the U and the paper's senior author.
"Everything is modified by fire; just take a look around at the books and furniture in this room. We're
surrounded by fire's byproducts," added Christopher Parker, anthropology postdoctoral research associate at
the U and the paper's first author.
The team's proposed scenario is the first known hypothesis in which fire does not originate serendipitously.
Instead, the team suggests that the genus Homo, which includes modern humans and their close relatives,
adapted to progressively fire-prone environments caused by increased aridity and flammable landscapes by
exploiting fire's food foraging benefits.
Parker and Hawkes conducted the research with University of Utah anthropology doctoral candidate Earl
Keefe, postdoctoral research associate Nicole Herzog and distinguished professor James F O'Connell.
Shedding light on the past
"All humans are fire-dependent. The data show that other animals and even some of our primate cousins use it
as an opportunity to eat better; they are essentially taking advantage of landscape fires to forage more
efficiently," said Hawkes.
By reconstructing tropical Africa's climate and vegetation about 2-3 million years ago, the research team
pieced together multiple lines of evidence to craft their proposed scenario for how early human ancestors first
used fire to their advantage.
To clarify the dating and scope of increasingly fire-prone landscapes, the research team took advantage of
recent work on carbon isotopes in paleosols, or ancient dirt. Because woody plants and more fire-prone
tropical grasses use different photosynthetic pathways that result in distinct variants of carbon, the carbon
isotopic composition of paleosols can directly indicate the percentage of woody plants versus tropical grasses.
Recent carbon analyses of paleosols from the Awash Valley in Ethiopia and Omo-Turkana basin in northern
Kenya and southern Ethiopia show a consistent pattern of woody plants being replaced by more tropical, fireprone grasses approximately 3.6-1.4 million years ago. This is explained by reductions in atmospheric carbon
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dioxide levels and increased aridity. Drier conditions and the expansion of fire-prone grasslands are also
evidenced in fossil wood evidence in Omo Shungura G Formation, Ethiopia.
As the ecosystem became increasingly arid and a pattern of rapid, recurring fluctuation between woodlands
and open grasslands emerged, many ancestral humans adapted to eating grassland plants and food cooked by
fires. In essence, they took advantage of the foraging benefits that fire provided.
Turn up the heat: more fire for more food
More specifically, fire-altered landscapes provided foraging benefits by improving both the processes of
searching for and handling food. The research team identified these benefits by using the prey/optimal diet
model of foraging, which simplifies foraging into two mutually exclusive components -- searching and
handling -- and ranks resources by the expected net profit of energy per unit of time spent handling. This
model identifies changes in the suite of resources that give the highest overall rate of gain as search and
handling costs change.
By burning off cover and exposing previously obscured holes and animal tracks, fire reduces search time; it
also clears the land for faster growing, fire-adapted foliage. Foods altered by burning take less effort to chew
and nutrients in seeds and tubers can be more readily digested. Those changes reduce handling efforts and
increase the value of those foods.
"Most people think that the logical reaction would be to run away from fire, but fire provided our ancestors
with a feeding opportunity. Evidence shows that other animals take advantage of fire for foraging, so it seems
very likely that our ancestors did as well," said Hawkes.
Without a trace
Landscapes burned by fire, then, had numerous foraging payoffs for genus Homo.
The proposed scenario not only explains how hominins came to manipulate fire for its foraging advantages,
but also provides a solution to the baffling mismatch between the fossil and archaeological records.
Anatomical changes associated with dependence on cooked food such as reduced tooth size and structures
related to chewing appear long before there is clear archaeological evidence of cooking hearths.
Parker and Hawkes' scenario resolves the mismatch by suggesting that the earliest forms of fire use by the
genus Homo would not have left traces in the form of traditional fire hearths.
Instead of cooking over a prepared hearth that would be visible archaeologically, hominins were taking
advantage of burns, had an increased energy budget and could travel longer distances. Early fire use,
therefore, would have been indistinguishable from naturally occurring fires.
"When our genus appears, almost immediately, those populations got out of Africa. If you look at the other
great apes, they're tied to habitats where juveniles can feed themselves. We were able to expand out of Africa
into Europe and Asia because our fire use not only earned higher return rates, but also permitted older women
in these communities to help feed juveniles, thereby freeing our ancestors to move into habitats where
youngsters couldn't feed themselves," said Hawkes.
"This scenario tells a story about our ancestors' foraging strategies and how those strategies allowed our
ancestors to colonize new habitats. It gives us more insight into why we came to be the way we are; fire
changed our ancestors' social organization and life history."
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Looking forward, the research team will take on an ethnographic project with the Hadza people, an
indigenous ethnic group in Tanzania that are among the last hunter-gatherers in the world, to learn how they
forage in burns. The team will also continue to study more examples of how nonhuman primates forage in
burns to confirm the anecdotal evidence that they take advantage of landscape fires, as well as further study
fire ecology in tropical Africa and how that allowed ancestors to move to other continents.
Story Source:
The above post is reprinted from materials provided by University of Utah.Note: Materials may be edited for
content and length.
Journal Reference:
1.
Christopher H. Parker, Earl R. Keefe, Nicole M. Herzog, James F. O'connell, Kristen Hawkes. The pyrophilic
primate hypothesis.Evolutionary Anthropology: Issues, News, and Reviews, 2016; 25 (2): 54
DOI: 10.1002/evan.21475
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/04/160412160555.htm
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Commuters Don't Stop Driving to Work Unless You Take Away Free Parking
Offering equal benefits to transit riders has little-to-no effect on travel choices.

ERIC JAFFE

@e_jaffe
Paul Sableman / Flickr
Congress recently reestablished parity for commuter tax benefits, granting people who take transit into work
as well as those who drive in and park at the office the same $255 a month in 2016. With that basic fairness
intact, the question becomes whether or not the rule will change rush-hour travel choices in any substantive
way. Given the bump in transit benefits, you might reasonably expect fewer employees to drive in alone, but
the evidence suggests you’d be wrong.
Fairness has never been the only goal of transit benefits. When Congress codified “transportation fringe
benefits” in the early 1990s, transit users got their token share not just for equity’s sake but with the idea that
such tax breaks would help balance out city commuting patterns. If that hope wasn’t explicit in the laws, it
was embedded in their interpretation; here’s the Congressional Research Service’s assessment of such
benefits to the Senate, in 2010:
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Motivating commuters in highly urbanized areas to use mass transportation can reduce commuting costs
generally. If workers commute in ways that reduce traffic congestion, all commuters in an area may enjoy
spillover benefits such as lower transportation costs, shorter waiting times in traffic, and improved air quality.
What policymakers didn’t quite understand then, and still don’t now, is the power of the free parking spot to
overwhelm transit benefits of any size. TransitCenter recently analyzed the impact of commuter benefits on
travel choices in five major cities: D.C., Miami, Seattle, San Francisco, and New York. The analysis found
that, relative to a world with no benefits at all, the “net effect of the parking and transit benefits together was
more driving.”
So for all its fairness, benefits parity distorts the natural order of commuting.Not only did TransitCenter find a
rise in car commuting across all five cities in 2014, when parking got a larger break than transit ($250 to
$130), but it also expected a rise across the board in 2016, when both modes get $255. The only scenario that
resulted in fewer people driving to work was when transit benefits remained at $255 a month and parking
benefits were eliminated:
Via TransitCenter
Note that in Miami and Seattle, car commuting didn’t change at all from 2014 to 2016. That’s because peak
monthly transit costs were already below the old benefit of $130—something that’s no doubt true of many if
not most U.S. cities, further limiting the new law’s impact on travel choice.
The work of Andrea Hamre at Virginia Tech has reached similar conclusions. In research from 2014, focusing
on Washington, D.C., she and Ralph Buehler found that parking and transit benefits together led to
an increased probability of driving to work, relative to a world with no benefits. Hamre recently expanded that
study to five cities (Baltimore, Philadelphia, Newark, and New York, as well as D.C.)—and discovered that
the same patterns held true.
Using regional travel surveys involving nearly 19,000 total commuters, Hamre predicted mode probabilities
based on various commuter benefits scenarios. When no subsidies are offered, 62.3 percent of people drive to
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work, as per the model. But when both parking and transit subsidies are offered, slightly morepeople take
their car—63.8 percent. Slightly more people take transit, too, but fewer people carpool or walk or ride their
bike, so on net traffic would be worse.
Again the only scenario that resulted in a reduced probability of driving was when employers offered transit
benefits but no free parking:
CityLab
“Overall, this study lends further support to the notion that public transport subsidies seem to be rendered less
effective when offered in the presence of car parking subsidies,” writes Hamre in preliminary findings
presented at TRB 2016, which she will expand for her dissertation later this year.
In Newark, these insights are playing out in the real world. As part of its attempt to reduce solo car commutes,
Panasonic moved downtown, eliminated parking subsidies for employees, and offered workers discounted
transit passes (an even better benefit than pretax fares). The result was a huge decline in the share of people
who drove into work alone, down to 36 from 88 percent, and a huge rise in those who took public transit, up
to 57 from 4 percent.
The point is not merely that commuter parking benefits “subsidize traffic congestion,” as TransitCenter put it
in a 2014 report. Nor that eliminating them would mean billions of dollars a year in tax revenue that could be
used for other public services, billions of fewer annual vehicles miles, and likely higher salaries. It’s really to
show that you can have these benefits for the individual or you can have “spillover benefits” for the city as a
whole—but, for all the transit parity in the world, you can’t have both.
http://www.citylab.com/commute/2016/02/commuting-driving-work-free-parking-transit-subsidy-benefitsparity-congress/462963/?utm_source=nl__link2_021716
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Short Cuts
Nick Richardson
‘You’re an idiot.’ On its own that sentence is an insult, but add an emoji and it can seem self-deprecatory,
even affectionate. Emoji – just in case you’ve been in space for the last few years – are little pictures that you
can add to text messages or emails to inflect what’s being said in words. There are 845 installed on the latest
iPhones. The set includes sixty-odd ‘smileys’, not all of them smiley: round, lemon-yellow faces that express
different emotions, from joy to grief to affection to terror. A new smiley, coming with the 2017 update, was
inspired by Maggie Smith’s character in Downton Abbey and portrays a sort of wrily amused disdain. You
can express more emotions in emoji than some people can express with their actual real-life faces. Smileys
aren’t the only humans either: there’s a
(ay caramba!), a
(best friends!) and
a
(me-time!). The inclusion of non-lemon-yellow humans necessitated the introduction by
Apple, last April, of skin-tone variants: the flamenco dancer now comes in five different shades. But there’s
much more to emoji than humans: there are animals, musical instruments, plants, astrological symbols,
murder weapons, items of clothing, at least three different kinds of sunrise (over mountains, sea and
skyscrapers) and a swirl of dogshit. ‘You’re an idiot
‘You’re an idiot
idiot
’ means ‘You’re an idiot (not really!)’
’ means ‘You’re an idiot because you left your purse behind.’ ‘You’re an
’ means ‘I’m rocking out in my imagination to a song that has “You’re an idiot” as its
chorus.’ ‘You’re an idiot
’ means ‘You’re an idiot … or are you?’
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Emoji don’t mean things in the same way as words mean things. The shit emoji for example,
,
doesn’t mean shit in the same way that merde means shit: its meaning depends on what’s being said in the
text, and to whom. It can be an illustration or a footnote, used straightforwardly as a pictogram – as in ‘I trod
in
’ or ‘You stink of
’ – or more abstractly, as in ‘I broke your washing
machine
’ (‘I am making your life harder for you, and revelling in it, thus I am a shit’). Emoji
Dick is a crowd-sourced and crowd-funded ‘translation’ of Moby Dick into emoji, but it’s not really a
translation at all, it’s more like a game of Dingbats. This is how it does ‘Call me Ishmael’:
. No, I don’t know what the hand is doing there
either, and I don’t know why they used that whale and not this more formidable one:
. Vyv
Evans, who teaches linguistics at Bangor University, claimed in a paper last year that emoji is the ‘fastest
growing form of language of all time’: 72 per cent of 18 to 25-year-olds say they find it easier to express their
emotions if they use emoji, he said. That’s not surprising, really: it’s far easier, and not just for teenagers, to
say
than ‘I fancy you.’ But emoji is an odd ‘form of language’ because it’s parasitic on other
languages and systems of implication and its usage can be wildly idiosyncratic. Different nations use emoji
differently: Canadians use
twice as much as the global average; Australians are more prolific
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than anyone else in their use of
,
and
. The games emoji users play
often look like jokes at the expense of the emoji themselves, a case in point being the
aubergine,
, which is rarely used to mean aubergine.
Emoji didn’t become popular in the West until Apple installed them on the iPhone in 2011, but they first
appeared in Japan in the 1990s. The word ‘emoji’, contrary to popular belief, doesn’t have anything to do with
emotion: it’s an amalgamation of the Japanese words for image, e, and character, moji. Emoji’s Japanese
origins account for the existence both of a
(an oden, a Japanese winter stew; the emoji depicts
the Shizuoka variation, in which the ingredients are skewered) and a
(a dango, a dessert of
sweet, skewered dumplings). They also explain why there’s a
, a mask representing a tengu (a
demon from Japanese folklore) that is used by Japanese people to express conceitedness, by Westerners to
express disgruntlement, and by me to express self-conscious hauteur. A new book, The Story of Emoji by
Gavin Lucas (Prestel, £14.99), traces the creation of emoji to an employee of the Japanese
telecommunications company NTT Docomo. In the mid-1990s, Docomo produced the Pocket Bell, a pager
which allowed users to attach a small
to their messages; it became very popular with flirty high
school kids. When the company invented i-mode, the world’s first widespread mobile internet platform, a
young engineer called Shigetaka Kurita decided to extend the Pocket Bell’s vocabulary of images. He created
a set of proto-emoji using a grid of 12 by 12 pixels. The Story of Emoji suggests that the popularity of
Kurita’s creation had to do with the specific needs of the Japanese business community, which had been upset
by the introduction of email in 1993. Traditionally, Japanese businessmen and women had sent one another
long, verbose letters that were full of seasonal greetings and honorific expressions and included a lot of
contextual information: ‘The absence of all of these cues in emails and texts meant that the promise of digital
communication … was being offset by an accompanying increase in miscommunication.’ Kurita’s characters
helped the sararimen stop accidentally disrespecting each other.
There were precursors that allowed us to do some of what emoji do before Kurita came along. The
Interrobang, ‽, a cross between an exclamation mark and a question mark, was invented by an American
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copywriter in 1962. (There was a competition to name it; ‘exclamaquest’, ‘quizding’ and ‘exclarotive’ were
runners up.) More significantly, emoticons – icons for emoting made out of conventional typographic
characters – have been used on the internet since at least the 1980s. In September 1982, a computer scientist
at Carnegie Mellon University proposed on an online message board that jokes could be marked :-) and nonjokes :-( . Hundreds of emoticons have appeared since then, the ‘winky face’ for example, ;-). One of the
more complicated is the 11-character shrug, which is read vertically rather than sideways: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. The
most important proto-emoji, though, is the smiley itself,
, which wasn’t invented by Forrest
Gump as Hollywood would have you believe, but by a graphic designer called Harvey Ball in 1963 on the
occasion of the State Mutual Life Assurance Company of Worcester, Massachusetts’s merger with the
Guarantee Mutual Company of Ohio. Ball was hired to produce a cheery design for buttons and posters that
could be distributed internally because company morale was low.
The State Mutual Life Assurance Company of Worcester, Massachusetts merged with the Guarantee Mutual
Company of Ohio, and the world was shaken to its core. The smiley rebelled against corporate culture and
became a hippy symbol, then the symbol of acid house. Now, 53 years on, emoji continue to advance the Age
of Aquarius by making you twice as likely to have sex, according to a recent survey sponsored by the dating
website match.com. The survey, which was conducted by Helen Fisher, a biological anthropologist at
Rutgers, found that 54 per cent of emoji-users had sex in 2014, compared with 31 per cent of emoji-shunners
– stop wasting your time on those sonnets, in other words. Men most like to
use
and
the more demure
when chatting people up, according to the study, while women favour
and
; when taking things to the next level, men like to deploy
the aubergine, but women apparently prefer the banana,
. Fisher echoed the sararimen in her
explanation of what’s going on: emoji are a way of compensating for texts and emails’ inability to convey
‘subtle inflection of the voice’. A report published by Business Insider in March agreed, claiming that more
and more businesses are including emoji in their press releases because it makes them seem more human.
Emoji have become so popular as a means of expressing emotion that those who don’t use them are seen as
emotionally illiterate. One company has started selling actual aubergines that you can have sent to an object
of your affections with a sexy message written on them in permanent marker, for only £6.99 apiece.
Aubergines are no longer merely aubergines.
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n08/nick-richardson/short-cuts
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Southern California's reduction in smog linked to major improvement in children's health
Bronchitic symptoms on the decline as pollution levels drop in Los Angeles region over the past two decades
April 12, 2016
Source:
University of Southern California
Summary:
A study that tracked Southern California children over a 20-year period has found they now have
significantly fewer respiratory symptoms as a result of improved air quality. Researchers examined a
health issue that makes many parents anxious while pulling at their pocketbooks: bronchitic
symptoms that could land otherwise healthy children in a doctor's office or hospital.
FULL STORY
Tiny particles called particulate matter 2.5 (PM 2.5) -- which can penetrate deep into lungs and cause serious
health problems -- dropped by 47 percent from 1992 to 2011 in the study region.
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Credit: Wendy Gutschow/USC
A USC study that tracked Southern California children over a 20-year period has found they now have
significantly fewer respiratory symptoms as a result of improved air quality.
The finding expands on the landmark USC Children's Health Study, which a year ago reported that kids' lungs
had grown stronger over the past 20 years as pollution levels in the Los Angeles Basin declined. In the current
study, USC researchers examined a health issue that makes many parents anxious while pulling at their
pocketbooks: bronchitic symptoms that could land otherwise healthy children in a doctor's office or hospital.
To assess respiratory symptoms, USC scientists studied children in eight California communities and defined
bronchitic symptoms over the preceding year as a daily cough for at least three consecutive months,
congestion or phlegm not related to a cold, or inflammation of the mucous membranes, according to Kiros
Berhane, lead author and a professor of preventive medicine at the Keck School of Medicine of USC.
"This is one of the few times that we have been able to report good news, and this is very likely a direct result
of the science-based policies that have been put in place," Berhane said. "The message that clean air leads to
better health in children should be taken seriously because it has implications for how we live and how
productive we become."
The study, published April 12 in the Journal of the American Medical Association, followed 4,602 children in
three cohorts as they aged from 5 to 18. During 1993 to 2012, children and their parents from Long Beach,
San Dimas, Upland, Riverside, Mira Loma, Lake Elsinore, Alpine and Santa Maria answered questionnaires
about children's health. Air quality was continuously monitored in each community.
"Because of the wide variations in ambient pollution levels among the eight California communities we
analyzed, these findings are applicable to other parts of the United States and maybe other parts of the world
as well," Berhane said, adding the results could help with asthma management and the overall respiratory
health of children.
How much children's respiratory health improved
Because bronchitic symptoms are usually about four times higher in children with asthma, the scientists
examined associations of air pollution reduction with bronchitic symptoms separately for kids with and
without asthma. Researchers also adjusted their analyses for age, gender, race or ethnicity, secondhand
tobacco smoke and presence of cockroaches in the home.
"It is important to note that while reductions in bronchitic symptoms were larger in children with asthma, they
were still substantial and significant in children without asthma as well -- indicating that all children have
benefited from the improvement in air quality over the past 20 years," Berhane said.
The study found that tiny particles called particulate matter 2.5 (PM 2.5) -- which can penetrate deep into
lungs and cause serious health problems -- dropped by 47 percent from 1992 to 2011 in the study region. USC
researchers were able to associate cleaner air with improved children's respiratory health. Kids with asthma
were 32 percent less likely to suffer from bronchitic symptoms, and children without asthma experienced a 21
percent reduction in these respiratory problems.
Moreover, nitrogen dioxide, which can reduce resistance to respiratory infections, decreased by 49 percent in
the same two decades. USC researchers linked the drop in nitrogen dioxide with a 21 percent decrease of
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bronchitic symptoms in children with asthma and a 16 percent decline of bronchitic symptoms in kids without
asthma.
"This type of data is important for policymaking and for how clinicians would advise their patients," Berhane
said.
The cost of asthma and sick children
About 1 in 10 children in the United States had asthma in 2009, according to the Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention. Medical expenses associated with asthma amounted to $50.1 billion in 2007 and cost the
nation about $3,300 per person each year.
"Changes in children's respiratory health have a ripple effect," Berhane said. "A child may stay home because
of severe bronchitic symptoms. That could mean parents have to call in sick or arrange for a caregiver.
Beyond quality of life, childhood asthma and bronchitic symptoms take a toll on children's school attendance,
parental productivity and society in general."
Asthma is the cause for almost 2 million emergency room visits each year, according to the Asthma and
Allergy Foundation of America. Each year, this respiratory condition is the reason for more than 14 million
doctor visits and about 439,000 hospital stays.
Frank Gilliland, senior author and a professor of preventive medicine at Keck Medicine of USC, said the USC
Children's Health Study is a unique examination because it has been able to follow children for so many
years.
"Asthma is the most common chronic disease of childhood, so the reduction of these symptoms by 16 to 32
percent is a big deal," Gilliland said. "We studied longitudinal cohorts of children for 20 years using
consistent methods and found that decreased levels of air pollutants were associated with a marked decrease
in bronchitic-related symptoms in children both with and without asthma. No other study has been able to
accomplish this."
Pollution and policy
California cities have consistently topped the American Lung Association's annual list of most polluted cities
by ozone or particulate matter pollution. Historically, Southern California has reported high levels of ambient
air pollution because of emissions from vehicles, industrial sources and two of the nation's largest ports.
"While the reduction in ambient air pollution has been observed during the past 20 years, it was most marked
after 2000 and is very likely due to policies that were put in place," Berhane said. "Even though this is very
encouraging, there is still room for improvement. We must recognize that in some cases, the ozone and
particulate matter levels in Southern California are still in violation of federal standards."
Some California regulatory policies that have been implemented include the Low-Emission Vehicle Program,
a risk-reduction plan for diesel-fueled engines and vehicles, and pollution controls at the ports of Los Angeles
and Long Beach.
For many years, environmental epidemiologists have reported adverse health effects associated with
increasingly polluted air. So the ability to report that Southern California has been on the path to cleaner air
and that this reduction in air pollution has led to significant improvement in children's health is a welcome
change, Gilliland said.
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Berhane added: "But we must not get complacent. We expect more cars on the road, more ships at our ports
and more economic activities in the region. Even if we maintain the current policies and practices in
environmental protection, pollution levels could start to rise again because of more cars and economic
activities. We have to stay vigilant so that we do not lose current gains in air quality and the associated
improvements in our children's health."
USC strives to conduct research that could have a global impact. This study was supported by the National
Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, the Health Effects Institute and the California Air Resources
Board.
Story Source:
The above post is reprinted from materials provided by University of Southern California. Note: Materials
may be edited for content and length.
Journal Reference:
1.
Kiros Berhane, Chih-Chieh Chang, Rob McConnell, W. James Gauderman, Edward Avol, Ed Rapapport,
Robert Urman, Fred Lurmann, Frank Gilliland. Association of Changes in Air Quality With Bronchitic
Symptoms in Children in California, 1993-2012. JAMA, 2016; 315 (14): 1491 DOI: 10.1001/jama.2016.3444
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/04/160412160352.htm
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Why Love Hurts: The Sociology of How Our Institutions Rather Than Our Personal Psychological Failings
Shape the Romantic Agony of Modern Life
Why Love Hurts: The Sociology of How Our Institutions Rather Than Our Personal Psychological Failings
Shape the Romantic Agony of Modern Life
“To perform gender identity and gender struggles is to perform the institutional and cultural core dilemmas
and ambivalence of modernity.”
BY MARIA POPOVA
“There is hardly any activity, any enterprise, which is started with such tremendous hopes and expectations,
and yet, which fails so regularly, as love,” philosopher Erich Fromm wrote in his foundational 1956 inquiry
intowhat is keeping us from mastering the art of loving. But why is it, really, that frustration is indelible to
satisfaction in romance? At least since Jacques Ferrand’s 17th-century treatise on lovesickness, scholars have
attempted to shed light on the phenomenon that has inspired the vast majority of art, music, and literature
since humanity’s dawn — the pain of love.
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In Why Love Hurts: A Sociological Explanation (public library), French-Moroccan sociologist and Israeli
public intellectual Eva Illouz examines how the social organization of modern life has profoundly altered the
hues and texture of our experience of romantic agony by transforming three elemental aspects of the self: “the
will (how we want something), recognition (what matters for our sense of worth), and desire (what we long
for and how we long for it).”
Illustration from An ABZ of Love Kurt Vonnegut’s favorite vintage Danish guide to sexuality
Although unrequited love and the anguish of longing have a perennial place in our experience of romantic
pain, Illouz is concerned with the pain that lives within actualized romantic relationships. She writes:
When relationships do get formed, agonies do not fade away, as one may feel bored, anxious, or angry in
them; have painful arguments and conflicts; or, finally, go through the confusion, self-doubts, and depression
of break-ups or divorces…. Despite the widespread and almost collective character of these experiences, our
culture insists they are the result of faulty or insufficiently mature psyches.
The rise of clinical psychology in the twentieth century only solidified and granted scientific legitimacy to
this notion that our romantic misery is a function of our psychological failings — an idea that caught on in
large part because implicit to it was the promise that those failings can be deconditioned. And yet, Illouz
argues, such overemphasis on individual shortcomings gravely warps the broader reality — a reality in which
the systems, institutions, and social contracts that govern our existence seed the core ambivalence of love and
life: what we really want.
She writes:
In the same way that at the end of the nineteenth century it was radical to claim that poverty was the result not
of dubious morality or weak character, but of systematic economic exploitation, it is now urgent to claim not
that the failures of our private lives are the result of weak psyches, but rather that the vagaries and miseries of
our emotional life are shaped by institutional arrangements… What is wrong are not dysfunctional childhoods
or insufficiently self-aware psyches, but the set of social and cultural tensions and contradictions that have
come to structure modern selves and identities.
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[…]
The reason why love is so central to our happiness and identity is not far from the reason why it is such a
difficult aspect of our experience: both have to do with the ways in which self and identity are
institutionalized in modernity… Love contains, mirrors, and amplifies the “entrapment” of the self in the
institutions of modernity, institutions, to be sure, shaped by economic and gender relations.
Art from Love Is Walking Hand in Hand by Charles Schulz, 1965
What Marx demonstrated about commodities in the marketplace Illouz aims to demonstrate about the
economy of love:
[Love] is shaped and produced by concrete social relations [and] circulates in a marketplace of unequal
competing actors… Some people command greater capacity to define the terms in which they are loved than
others.
Illouz argues that sociology — a discipline, more than any other, “born out of a frantic and anxious
questioning about the meaning and consequences of modernity” — is the most revelatory lens through which
to examine how modern life, marked by the period beginning at the end of WWI, has restructured the
romantic self. Nearly a century after Bertrand Russell’s inquiry into why religion arose in human life and
what is supplanting it, she considers how the displacement of religion by secular culture has impacted our
ideals and our interior experience of love:
Modernity sobered people up from the powerful but sweet delusions and illusions that had made the misery of
their lives bearable. Devoid of these fantasies, we would lead our lives without commitment to higher
principles and values, without the fervor and ecstasy of the sacred, without the heroism of saints, without the
certainty and orderliness of divine commandments, but most of all without those fictions that console and
beautify.
Such sobering up is nowhere more apparent than in the realm of love, which for several centuries in the
history of Western Europe had been governed by the ideals of chivalry, gallantry, and romanticism. The male
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ideal of chivalry had one cardinal stipulation: to defend the weak with courage and loyalty. The weakness of
women was thus contained in a cultural system in which it was acknowledged and glorified because it
transfigured male power and female frailty into lovable qualities… Women’s social inferiority could thus be
traded for men’s absolute devotion in love, which in turn served as the very site of display and exercise of
their masculinity, prowess, and honor. More: women’s dispossession of economic and political rights was
accompanied (and presumably compensated) by the reassurance that in love they were not only protected by
men but also superior to them. It is therefore unsurprising that love has been historically so powerfully
seductive to women; it promised them the moral status and dignity they were otherwise denied in society and
it glorified their social fate: taking care of and loving others, as mothers, wives, and lovers. Thus, historically,
love was highly seductive precisely because it concealed as it beautified the deep inequalities at the heart of
gender relationships.
[…]
To perform gender identity and gender struggles is to perform the institutional and cultural core dilemmas and
ambivalence of modernity, dilemmas that are organized around the key cultural and institutional motives of
authenticity, autonomy, equality, freedom, commitment, and self-realization. To study love is not peripheral
but central to the study of the core and foundation of modernity.
As sexuality became unmoored from morality, love became a currency for social mobility. Illouz places this
shift alongside the Scientific Revolution, the invention of the printing press, and the rise of capitalism in its
effects on our lives and our basic experience of identity. She writes:
While love has played a considerable role in the formation of what historians call “affective individualism,”
the story of love in modernity tends to present it as a heroic one, from bondage to freedom. When love
triumphs, so this story goes, marriages of convenience and interest disappear, and individualism, autonomy,
and freedom are triumphant. Nevertheless, while I agree that romantic love challenged both patriarchy and the
family institution, the “pure relationship” also rendered the private sphere more volatile and the romantic
consciousness unhappy. What makes love such a chronic source of discomfort, disorientation, and even
despair … can be adequately explained only by sociology and by understanding the cultural and institutional
core of modernity.
[…]
By juxtaposing the ideal of romantic love with the institution of marriage, modern polities embed social
contradictions in our aspirations, contradictions which in turn take a psychological life. The institutional
organization of marriage (predicated on monogamy, cohabitation, and the pooling of economic resources
together in order to increase wealth) precludes the possibility of maintaining romantic love as an intense and
all-consuming passion. Such a contradiction forces agents to perform a significant amount of cultural work in
order to manage and reconcile the two competing cultural frames. This juxtaposition of two cultural frames in
turn illustrates how the anger, frustration, and disappointment that often inhere in love and marriage have
their basis in social and cultural arrangements.
How to reconcile these competing cultural frames and manage the deep, daily frustrations they germinate is
what Illouz goes on to explore in the remainder of the illuminating Why Love Hurts. Complement it with
philosopher Alain Badiou on how we fall and stay in love and Anna Dostoyevsky on the secret to a happy
marriage.
HTTPS://WWW.BRAINPICKINGS.ORG/2016/03/22/WHY-LOVE-HURTS-EVAILLOUZ/?MC_CID=EEF0166E83&MC_EID=D1C16AC662
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DIFFERENT KINDS OF READERS: A PARKS AND REC EDITION
DEEPALI AGARWAL04-06-16
Despite their claims of hating the library and everything about it, we know the Parks and Recreation gang
secretly loved reading (and we refuse to accept otherwise). Here’s a handy guide to figuring out what kind of
reader you are, Pawnee-style.
#1. When you read something you love, you become evangelistic about it, and will not rest until your friends
agree that said book is awesome, and validate all the feelings that it is giving you.
God forbid someone insult your fave reads.
You’re a Leslie Knope:
“Why am I reading this?”
“Because I’m almost done with it, Ann! And I wanna talk to you about Patty!”
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#2. You have extremely selective taste in literature. You might just make exceptions for books written by
“workplace proximity acquaintances,” but as a rule, anything you read has to be right bang at the center of
your wheelhouse, or it just doesn’t make the cut. If a books has “frou-frou” symbolism, you just lose it.
You’re a Ron Swanson:
“Usually I only read nautical novels or my own personal manifestos.”
#3. If a book doesn’t come with a side of vampire romance, it doesn’t really deserve your time. People are
advised to stay clear of talking about “real readers” around you. What other people like to call “guilty
pleasures” is the stuff you live by. How else will you survive your day job?
You’re a Donna Meagle:
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#4. You will read books that your friends recommend, but that doesn’t mean you feel the same way about
them as they do. You sometimes have radically different opinions about books, that cause the general public
to collectively gasp.
You’re an Ann Perkins:
#5. You’re the absolute boss of speed-reading. You don’t understand what people mean when they claim they
don’t have time to read. You read on your way to work, you read while doing chores, and you’d read in the
shower if they’d just make waterproof books already.
You’re a Chris Traeger:
“One time, I read all of Siddhartha at a traffic stop.”
#6. If there’s a fantasy book series out there, you most definitely own it. When Game of Thrones is on TV,
you like to keep your box-set of books handy just so that you can shout out “THAT’S NOT HOW IT IS IN
THE BOOK” at regular intervals.
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You’re a Ben Wyatt:
“You know, ‘nerd culture’ is mainstream now. So, when you use the word ‘nerd’ derogatorily, it means
you’re the one that’s out of the zeitgeist.”
#7. You’re a literary taste-maker among your followers. If you recommend a book, people will scramble to
read it, and it will show up on bestseller lists everywhere.
You’re a Joan Callamezzo (you may or may not be drunk at your book club meetings, though):
P.S. Am I the only one who thinks The Time Traveler’s Optometristshould be a real book?
http://bookriot.com/2016/04/06/7-different-kinds-of-readers-a-parks-and-recedition/?mc_cid=1cf5e37fa4&mc_eid=e2e1960cb5
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14 Moving Photos of Heartbreak and Hope After the Fukushima Disaster
If this was your home, would you move back?
Photographs by Michael Forster Rothbart
| Fri Mar. 11, 2016 7:00 AM EST
One week after residents were allowed to move back to Naraha, 12 miles south of the Fukushima nuclear
plant, the town celebrates with a grand reopening of Tenjinmisaki, a seaside resort. Hundreds of former
residents come to the ceremony, but in the following weeks the hotel remains nearly vacant.
If you were from Fukushima, Japan, would you move back, despite your fears about radiation?
This is the question photojournalist Michael Forster Rothbart asked as he returned to Fukushima last fall to
report on what's happened over the past five years, after a tsunami and nuclear disaster hit northern Japan and
destroyed the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. Some 488,000 people were evacuated from the threepart disaster. In 2015, nearly 25 percent remained displaced.
Forster Rothbart arrived one week after the nearby city of Naraha had reopened, in September 2015. He
stayed in Naraha, 12 miles south of the Fukushima plant and the first town in the Fukushima Exclusion Zone
to reopen after the disaster. So far, only 440 residents have returned home, out of 7,400 who had lived there
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before. Rothbart interviewed returning residents and asked them to write down their hopes and fears for their
hometowns.
"I wanted to help these people tell their own stories," he says. "Five years ago, the news stories were about the
disaster itself, but now it's time to tell stories of resilience and recovery."
In Tomioka, the town next to Naraha, no residents have returned. Evacuees are allowed to visit their former
homes during daylight hours. Thousands of laborers in Tomioka are cleaning or demolishing every building,
as well as removing and incinerating all topsoil in inhabited areas. In a couple of years, the government
intends to reopen parts of Tomioka; other neighborhoods are too radioactive and may never reopen.
This is part of a much larger project by Forster Rothbart, called Would You Stay?, that looks at the aftermath
of nuclear disasters.
Tamaki Sunaguchi
Tamaki Sunaguchi is a decontamination laborer working in Tomioka. He was working in the forest division—
clearing all underbrush and topsoil from nearby woodland areas and bagging it for incineration. Now he has
been transferred to a road decontamination crew. For now, he's living in the mountains in Kawauchi, in a
worker hotel constructed out of stacked shipping containers that have been converted to dorm rooms.
"Sometimes we work in highly contaminated areas," he says. "I worry about health, but I'll be home after a
year of this." For now, he's living in the mountains in Kawauchi, in a worker hotel constructed out of stacked
shipping containers that have been converted to dorm rooms.
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There's a complex maze of contractors, subcontractors, and sub-subcontractors who have divvied up the
government contracts for remediation work. Some lower-tier subcontractors have been criticized for
underpaying workers and withholding a big chunk of workers' wages for housing and transportation, but there
has been little government oversight.
Yuriko Igari from Naraha now lives in evacuee housing an hour away. She returns during the fall equinox
holiday to pay respect to her ancestors, praying at the family gravesite near her former home.
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Hidekatsu Ouchi
Hidekatsu Ouchi is a farmer from Yamakiya village, in the middle of the Fukushima Exclusion Zone.
Although the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant is more than 30 miles away, the worst contamination
blew directly toward his village. He knows he'll never be able to farm this land again due to the high radiation
levels, but he hasn't given up hope that he'll be allowed to live here. As a temporary solution, he's rented his
farmhouse out to a team of radiobiologists for use as a research station—which gives him a reason to come
back regularly for visits.
Standing beside his family's shrine, Ouchi writes, "Somehow I want to restore Yamakiya to its previous
situation by any means possible, and live there together (with all the original residents), all of us again."
However, he worries this is impossible. "Yamakiya, which I love and where I was born and lived until today,
I worry how it's going to be here from now on," he adds.
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Nuclear scientist Ikuro Anzai and his dosimetry team measure radiation levels near Torikawa Nursery School
in Fukushima City and then report their findings to school director Miyoko Sato. He counsels residents to
make safety decisions based on evidence rather than emotions: "Look hard at what the facts are, think hard,
and then put it into practice," he advises.
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Hisao Yanai
When the tsunami hit, Hisao Yanai was head of the local Yakuza (Japanese mafia) in Naraha. He says the
disaster changed him; he decided to leave the mafia and dedicate himself to helping people. He now owns a
Japanese pub in Naraha, but he kept many symbols of his former status, including a taxi-yellow Hummer and
the stuffed polar bear in the foyer of his sprawling house.
Just after this photo was taken, Yanai, who has one hand, sat beside the bear holding a whiteboard. He wrote
about his hope—"solidarity"—and his worry for the future: "How to accomplish the reconstruction of my
hometown."
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A decontamination supervisor in Tomioka reviews plans for the next day’s work. Maruto, one of the
construction companies cleaning up Tomioka, uses an abandoned eldercare facility for its local office.
Although Tomioka is next to Naraha, no residents have returned. The 15,800 evacuees are allowed to visit
their former homes during daylight hours. In a couple more years, the government intends to reopen parts of
the town; other neighborhoods are too radioactive and may never reopen.
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Seven miles from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, buildings and cars destroyed by the March 11,
2011, tsunami still stand in the neighborhood near the former Tomioka train station. In 2015, four and a half
years after the disaster, tourists and former residents come to see the damage while laborers work nearby to
decontaminate homes and commercial properties before demolition. Almost all developed properties in
Tomioka are now being cleaned or demolished.
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Naraha Mayor Yukiei Matsumoto
Mayor Yukiei Matsumoto was one of the first people to move back to Naraha more than a year ago—during
decontamination and eight months before the town reopened to the public in September 2015. He has been a
tireless proponent for his town. He and his staff successfully fought a national government proposal to
establish a long-term nuclear waste dump in the town. Instead, they have looked for subsidies and other ways
to bring new businesses here. Also, they have plans for a new "compact town" development with commercial
space and housing that will replace homes lost in the tsunami. City leaders hope to attract evacuees from
towns closer to the nuclear plant who won't ever be able to return to their original homes.
"I hope Naraha will become a town where we can see many children's smiles," the mayor says, careful to
frame his worries in a positive light. Still, despite his efforts to persuade residents and his optimistic
predictions of growth, the mayor admits he really doesn't know how many will come back.
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Miyoko Sato, director of Torikawa Nursery School in Fukushima City, has been concerned about radiation on
the roads and playground near the school where students walk and play. After inviting physicist Ikuro Anzai
to measure radiation levels in the neighborhood, Sato plans to allow the students' daily outdoor walks to begin
again.
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Yukiko Endo
Yukiko Endo, an evacuee from Naraha, has found a job in her hometown, working as a waitress at the newly
reopened Tenjinmisaki hotel. After work, she often stops at her empty house nearby before commuting to her
temporary apartment in Iwaki, an hour away. She plans to move back to Naraha in 2016, bringing her parents
with her. She writes, "I hope Naraha town has lots of beautiful nature." When asked, she declines to add
anything more specific.
However, a few days after the interview, she leaves us a long letter. "After the disaster, I lost the ability to
believe people. So many things happened and I was about to have depression. I thought I would be spoiled at
this rate, so that I decided to go out and work," she wrote. "I decided to smile all the time in order not to
worry others around me. Even though the steps are very small, I now feel like being able to overcome the
problem of distrusting others."
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Ben Takeda, a Fukushima decontamination supervisor for the Joint Venture in Tomioka, Japan, in the
Fukushima Exclusion Zone, checks in with laborers working to decontaminate homes and commercial
properties.
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As towns in the Fukushima Exclusion Zone get decontaminated, scraped topsoil, organic waste, and debris
from demolished buildings with low-level radioactive contamination get loaded into heavy-duty cubic-meter
bags. These bags pile up on work sites, roadsides, and temporary storage fields across the Exclusion Zone.
This storage site, by the Yamadahama neighborhood in Naraha, has bags stacked three high in pyramids of
192 bags; a total of 12,096 bags will occupy this site when it is full, and the field is one of dozens in the
floodplain beside the Kido river.
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Masatoshi Ohata
Masatoshi Ohata is an engineer working to design robots that will decontaminate the inside of the Fukushima
Daiichi plant. He lives in Iwaki but has brought his grandchildren, ages 7 and 11, to go biking at a seaside
park in Naraha. His wife, Kumiko Ohata, believes this visit should be safe as long as their stay does not
exceed three hours.
Masatoshi writes, "Please do not forget about the people who are suffering from the damages by tsunami." As
the family walks to their car, he explains the concerns he alluded to. Evacuees from the nuclear exclusion
zone receive a lot of attention from the government and many benefits, including free housing and
compensation for their losses and "mental anguish." However, evacuees who lost homes solely from the
natural disaster are neglected and receive almost no support.
http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/03/return-fukushima-japan-tsunami-nuclear-disasterrebuilding-photos
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How the brain produces consciousness in 'time slices'
April 12, 2016
Source:
Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
Summary:
Scientists propose a new way of understanding of how the brain processes unconscious information
into our consciousness. According to the model, consciousness arises only in time intervals of up to
400 milliseconds, with gaps of unconsciousness in between.
FULL STORY
Artist's concept (stock image).
Credit: © rolffimages / Fotolia
EPFL scientists propose a new way of understanding of how the brain processes unconscious information into
our consciousness. According to the model, consciousness arises only in time intervals of up to 400
milliseconds, with gaps of unconsciousness in between.
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The driver ahead suddenly stops, and you find yourself stomping on your brakes before you even realize what
is going on. We would call this a reflex, but the underlying reality is much more complex, forming a debate
that goes back centuries: Is consciousness a constant, uninterrupted stream or a series of discrete bits -- like
the 24 frames-per-second of a movie reel? Scientists from EPFL and the universities of Ulm and Zurich, now
put forward a new model of how the brain processes unconscious information, suggesting that consciousness
arises only in intervals up to 400 milliseconds, with no consciousness in between. The work is published
in PLOS Biology.
Continuous or discrete?
Consciousness seems to work as continuous stream: one image or sound or smell or touch smoothly follows
the other, providing us with a continuous image of the world around us. As far as we are concerned, it seems
that sensory information is continuously translated into conscious perception: we see objects move smoothly,
we hear sounds continuously, and we smell and feel without interruption. However, another school of thought
argues that our brain collects sensory information only at discrete time-points, like a camera taking snapshots.
Even though there is a growing body of evidence against "continuous" consciousness, it also looks like that
the "discrete" theory of snapshots is too simple to be true.
A two-stage model
Michael Herzog at EPFL, working with Frank Scharnowski at the University of Zurich, have now developed
a new paradigm, or "conceptual framework," of how consciousness might actually work. They did this by
reviewing data from previously published psychological and behavioral experiments that aim to determine if
consciousness is continuous or discrete. Such experiments can involve showing a person two images in rapid
succession and asking them to distinguish between them while monitoring their brain activity.
The new model proposes a two-stage processing of information. First comes the unconscious stage: The brain
processes specific features of objects, e.g. color or shape, and analyzes them quasi-continuously and
unconsciously with a very high time-resolution. However, the model suggests that there is no perception of
time during this unconscious processing. Even time features, such as duration or color change, are not
perceived during this period. Instead, the brain represents its duration as a kind of "number," just as it does for
color and shape.
Then comes the conscious stage: Unconscious processing is completed, and the brain simultaneously renders
all the features conscious. This produces the final "picture," which the brain finally presents to our
consciousness, making us aware of the stimulus.
The whole process, from stimulus to conscious perception, can last up to 400 milliseconds, which is a
considerable delay from a physiological point of view. "The reason is that the brain wants to give you the
best, clearest information it can, and this demands a substantial amount of time," explains Michael Herzog.
"There is no advantage in making you aware of its unconscious processing, because that would be immensely
confusing." This model focuses on visual perception, but the time delay might be different for other sensory
information, e.g. auditory or olfactory.
This is the first two-stage model of how consciousness arises, and it provides a more complete picture of how
the brain manages consciousness than the "continuous versus discrete" debate envisages. But it especially
provides useful insights about the way the brain processes time and relates it to our perception of the world.
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Story Source:
The above post is reprinted from materials provided by Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. The
original item was written by Nik Papageorgiou. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.
Journal Reference:
1.
Michael H. Herzog, Thomas Kammer, Frank Scharnowski. Time Slices: What Is the Duration of a
Percept? PLOS Biology, 2016; 14 (4): e1002433 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.1002433
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/04/160412160346.htm
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How Copenhagen Paused Its Waterfront Redevelopment
The city's five-year period of encouraging "creative" businesses helped Paper Island thrive, but what happens
now?

FEARGUS O'SULLIVAN

@FeargusOSull
COBE and Luxigon
In 2012, the city of Copenhagen received a plan to redevelop a chunk of its most valuable real estate. The site
was called Paper Island, also known asChristiansholm, a warehouse-covered islet in the city’s inner harbor
that had only just been vacated by the printing industry.
Divided from the city center by the harbor’s waters, the 29,000-square-meter (312,000-square-foot) island
was perfectly located just across from Copenhagen’s main theater, the Danish royal family’s winter palace,
and the photogenic, tourist-filled quayside at Nyhavn. With splendid waterfront views, the site could hardly
be more tempting or profitable as a place to build new homes or offices. But when new owners By & Havn—
itself co-owned by the municipality and the Danish national government—suggested redevelopment, the
city’s response was interesting.
They didn’t say yes, they didn’t say no. They said: wait five years.
Copenhagen, the municipality decided, needed some freer, more creative spaces to keep the city interesting—
even if the arrangement was only temporary. So Paper Island was granted a five-year interim period during
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which its warehouses could be let out affordably to “creative” businesses. This would give the island a feeling
of freedom and a buzz, complementing the nearby autonomous community of Freetown Christiania.
In 2017, this five-year-period comes to a close and Copenhagen’s pop-up creative neighborhood must
effectively come to an end. Construction will begin the following year along lines detailed in a plan from
COBE architects, whose proposal was announced as the successful bidder last week. So how has the five-year
plan functioned as a scheme for managing development of the inner city?
So far, so good
It’s actually been a great success. Paper Island has become a very lively place. The tenants who moved in
aren’t exactly fringe organizations, but they do read like a mini-roll call of Copenhagen creativity. Current
occupants include a hangar filled with street-food stalls, an experimental science and technologymuseum, the
offices of design company and international cycling gurusCopenhagenize, and Denmark’s hottest fashion
designer, Henrik Vibskov, who also runs a small café on the island. Even COBE, the designers of the new
Paper Island redevelopment, have their offices in the warehouses.
Crowds on Paper Island’s waterfront. (Roman Boed / Flickr)
Relative affordability aside, the attraction of the island is obvious. It’s scrappy but instantly appealing, its
plain concrete buildings flanked by palatial historic warehouses and offering gorgeous views across the water.
It’s also right in the city center. Copenhagen’s new opera house is just to the north, while the world famous
restaurant Noma is just south. But until a bridge currently under construction to the island next door is
completed, it still feels slightly sheltered, accessible via ferry or a slightly long detour via another bridge.
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Backed by more partly redeveloped docklands, the area feels pleasantly unmanaged for somewhere in the
heart of a major Western city.
So far, so good. Whether the next phase of development will be as successful is another matter. A few aspects
of the current regime will continue. Some tenants may stay (the street food hangar, for one, appears in COBE
renderings), enhanced by a public plaza flanked by a new swimming pool and large event halls grouped
around a new green courtyard. On top of these facilities will be piled housing—lots of it. Grouped in glasswalled hulks whose funnel-shaped gables recall historic Hanseatic warehouse designs, these new apartments
could be spectacular for those who can afford them.
But is this what Copenhagen needs at its heart? Some key voices say no.
A “millionaire’s ghetto”
Morten Kabell, the city’s transport and environment mayor (effectively a city commissioner), has
harshly criticized the plans via his Copenhagen City Hallwebsite. He alleges that it will prioritize
luxury development over social use, destroy Copenhagen’s industrial history, and encourage more
motor traffic by including an underground car garage in an area that’s now mainly car-free.
Instead, Kabell wants to preserve some of the original buildings and ensure that at least 25
percent of the new housing is affordable:
A rendering of the plan for Paper Island, showing the opera house in the background. (COBE and
Luxigon)
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“Copenhagen must not become too mundane and polished. Therefore I will push on with the fight to preserve
one of the paper island's old industrial halls as a living example of the area's history. … The area's unique
location creates a risk that Paper Island could become a millionaire’s ghetto because of sky-high prices for
apartments.”
That such official condemnation is possible without jeopardizing the project is due to Copenhagen’s coalition
politics. Kabell and the city’s official mayor, Frank Jensen, come from different parties, so the former’s
disapproval doesn’t automatically stymie, or even necessarily alter, the plan. Kabell’s concerns over
affordability nonetheless make sense when you realize that what’s happening at Paper Island reflects the
transformation of Copenhagen as a whole. All around Copenhagen’s huge waterfront—one of the city’s few
undeveloped spaces—luxury development is being prized over affordable housing.
“After we decommissioned the harbor and moved all the heavy shipping out, we discovered that we had 42
kilometers [26 miles] of waterfront to develop,”Mikael Colville-Andersen, CEO at Copenhagenize, tells
CityLab. “What have they done with it? They’ve built luxury apartment after luxury apartment. There are a
few cooler developments further south in the harbor that are slightly more affordable, but like so many others,
the buildings on Paper Island will be for the elite. I'm left feeling very pessimistic.”
Great urbanist expectations
At least Copenhagen has managed this process better than most. The value of Paper Island’s land is so great
that few cities could resist the temptation to squeeze maximum profit from it. And while other cities would
have allowed redevelopment immediately, Copenhagen should be applauded for encouraging some less
obviously profitable uses, even if just for a brief window of time. This elegant balancing between different
needs is an approach many cities would do well to emulate.
The project should still ring alarm bells over Copenhagen’s ongoing role as an urban role model. Denmark’s
capital has been a beacon on many issues for decades—reducing car use, creating bike infrastructure that is
the world’s envy, managing environmental challenges gracefully, and cleaning its harbor waters until they
sparkle. But when it comes to arguably the key issue facing most Western cities today—creating and
preserving affordable housing—the city has so far drawn a blank. It does better than many other cities in
Europe, but the sense of leadership it has shown in other areas is lacking.
The redevelopment of Paper Island will deliver the world a not-bad example of something it’s already
familiar with—a luxury waterfront development with a few token public amenities. It’s arguably a tribute to
Copenhagen’s great urbanist successes that many people hoped for something better.
http://www.citylab.com/cityfixer/2016/02/copenhagen-paper-island-waterfront-redevelopmentcreative-business-copenhagenize/463137/?utm_source=nl__link1_021716
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