Hungry Planet

Hungry Planet is one of those books that you hope one day to read, but doubt that you’ll ever really cuddle up with a foot-wide, inch thick book. Well, I attempted and achieved the impossible. This amazing chronicle of world food culture and I snuggled in bed for months, with me traveling to a new country each night. The authors Peter Menzel and Faith D’Alusio visited families across the world, studying their culture, health, and wealth through the lens of “food”.

The book displays written chronicles which are complemented by detailed photographs of a week’s worth of food and food preparation. What really makes the book interesting is how it captures your attention both visually and mentally, where you might find yourself squinting to read the full label on the bottle of Mexican coca-cola or the package of canned lunchmeat. It is also helpful that the complete contents of the photographs are detailed in a list broken down by type of food and cost. This section usually proved to be equally fascinating, with some families consuming over a thousand bags of tea, 100 tortillas or a liter of lard per week.

With the increase in our global food interests, Hungry Planet serves as a first-hand look at what the world is currently eating – some customs have been the same for thousands of years even while it seems you can’t go anywhere without stumbling across a Starbucks. It introduced me to a wide variety of ingredients I had never even heard of before, and at the same time woke me up to how weird and off-course America is. To balance the U.S. perspective, the authors chose to profile three American families, one in Texas, California, and Georgia. The family from Georgia was the most interesting, as they claimed to have changed their eating habits considerably after having posed for the week’s-worth-of-food photo (over half of their food was eaten out or was microwaveably prepared). Overall, though, the American food was all over the map and was generally gross. The Australians even beat us in food appeal, which I found pretty remarkable.

Overall, I recommend this book for its ease of reading, its intensely interesting photographs, and its “grab” factor (i.e.: it will most likely be grabbed out of any reader’s hands, with a “I wanna see it!”). Like Peter Menzel’s other book production, Material World (a photo documentation of the world’s possessions), Hungry Planet is a true look at the world’s mis-distribution of wealth and resources, and an alarm call to those who have the means to live well, yet continue to abuse themselves and their food for no apparent reason.

Engines of Creation

Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology
K. Eric Drexler (Anchor Books, 1987)

Did you know the Internet is a series of tubes? And, according to Senator Ted Stevens, when your connection is slow or down, it’s because the tubes are all jammed up? Oh, ok: it’s not really. That’s just the latest example of tech-related hilarity to make its way around the Internet (which is actually made up of, y’know, pumpkins and fiddly little worms).

But the Ted Stevens ‘Internet-tubes’ meme is instructional because it highlights how people try to make sense of the technology in their lives, and how when they’re wrong, we mock them. It’s a natural course of action, almost Darwinian in its simple, elegant beauty.

Though everyone is in some way forced to accomodate and make sense of technology already in their lives, predicting the future evolution of technologies is a much trickier proposition. So when I gently mock Eric Drexler for his far-out chapter on the ‘network of knowledge’ (his prediction, circa 1987, of what we call the “Web”), I do so with all due respect for the difficulty of the task, and the hope that he’s more accurate with his other predictions. In re: the ‘network of knowledge,’ Drexler writes:

Hypertext readers will be able to see whether linked sources support an idea or linked criticisms explode it. Authors will write pithy, exciting summaries of ideas and link them to the lengthy, boring explanations. As authors expound and critics argue, they will lay out their competing worldview networks in parallel, point by point. Readers still won’t be able to judge ideas instantly or perfectly, but they will be able to judge them faster and better. In this way, hypertext will help us with a great task of our time: judging what lies ahead, and adjusting our thinking to prospects that shake the foundations of established worldviews. Hypertext will strengthen our foresight.

Which I hereby refute thusly.

Fortunately, Drexler has much bigger ideas than just this ‘network of knowledge.’ He is the Chief Technical Advisor of Nanorex, a founder of the Foresight Institute, and a far-seeing futurist who predicts a fundamental change in human life when our technological capabilities reach a certain sophistication. I saw Drexler present his ideas at the Stanford Singularity Summit in May, a convocation of similarly foresightful individuals.

Without digressing too far, the Singularity is the handy term for the belief that our technology will soon make a rapid leap forward. Its proponents cite different triggers for the onset of the Singularity — smarter-than-human artificial intelligence, the end of the Mayan calendar, etc. — but the end result is the same: human society will never be the same.

It’s the stuff of science fiction, to be sure, but Drexler’s book is equal parts science and science fiction. Or, more accurately, it takes scientific achievement as its launchpad, and then speculates future outcomes of this achievement.

The achievement, according to Drexler today, is very close. The achievement, according to 1987 Drexler, as evidenced by Engines of Creation, is still pretty close. The achievement itself is nanomachinery, tools made of the building blocks of the universe to build more building blocks.

As mundane as it sounds, Engines of Creation uses nanomachinery to predict all matter of world-changing events, and the net effect is one long repetition of “everything’s going to be OK.” For instance, the advent of nanomachinery will allow us to live much, much longer than we do now, possibly even live forever. When you’ve got countless tiny machines fixing each of your cells as they decay, what reason would there be to age?

Another example Drexler uses is in manufacturing, specifically manufacturing space-traveling vehicles. (Again with the science fiction!) Working at the molecular level makes possible a new kind of material, stronger and lighter than anything currently available, and thus freeing us from the aging, bulky Space Shuttle-based space exploration, and opening up the rest of the solar system, the galaxy, the universe. (This, of course, will also be aided by nanomachines that are able to place humans in a kind of isolated indefinite deep-freeze, to be revived on demand — suspended animation made real.)

It’s a soothing message, but for the few warnings sprinkled through Engines. As evidenced by the horrible mockery of ‘life sciences’ that food biotechnology has become (the revolution that was supposed to feed the planet has instead poisoned the planet, driven farmers to suicide, and lined the pockets of Monsanto executives), these new technologies balance on a cusp: they can be used for good or evil, resulting in paradise on Earth (or Mars, or Omicron Perseii 8, or what have you) or our total destruction at the hands of superbugs and the pervasive gray goo.

Drexler is careful to give some credence to the fears of malevolent nanotechnology, but Engines of Creation is an overwhelmingly positive, cheerleadery look at how great our future will soon be.

For those of us who aren’t in the life sciences or any field that might have an impact on the evolution of nanotech, the only purpose in reading this book is to have our fears put at ease (if you had these fears, they’re at ease. If you didn’t have these fears, and you do after reading this, then I’m sorry). Just sit back and wait, the trusty scientists at Nanorex and your nearby university are working hard to make this happen.

I reached a point about three-quarters through Engines when I realized that, from my persepctive, there was no real point to reading the book. As an optimist, I’m in no real fear of the future. I tend to believe everything’s going to work out well anyway, and since there’s clearly no way I’m going to join the scientific revolution with all my years away from the lab, I’d rather just let them go ahead and make things better, if that’s what they’re going to do anyway.

So if you want to take a look at one man’s perspective on the future and how great it’ll be, (and if you’re 30 or so, this book will convince you that you’re gonna live a long, long time), then by all means check out Engines of Creation. If you’re just looking for a good read, let me suggest Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow, another participant in the Singularity Summit, whose book draws on a lot of these ideas and tells a real good story to boot.

And by the by, I realized while writing this that you can read Engines of Creation in its entirety on Drexler’s website. I’d recommend skipping the first section, and going right to his “Profiles of the Possible.”

To the Lighthouse

To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

To the Lighthouse is an amazing book. Woolf flows in and out of each character’s mind, on a beachy summer day when all thought revolves around Mrs. Ramsay — a beautiful socialite/mother/wife that everyone adores (ostensibly). One of the most effective aspects of this type of narration is the deconstructive power of varying perspectives. Each character’s brain receives & disects the scenes and information of the day in such vastly different ways, that a reader is able to see how absolutely subjective reality is — and thereby how nonessential one’s own take on it.

Woolf also plays with the idea of scale. For most of the story, the reader is intimately and impossibly close to the characters and thus the specific action of the story. But two thirds of the way through, Woolf spans outward, looks at the beauty of time changing and moving, while considering everything on a very large and unfocused scale. This juxtaposition of human scale with monstrously large and indefinite time serves to contextualize the trifles that occupy the minds of the characters, while making their struggle seem somehow as poetic as the changing winds.

The complexity that Woolf establishes for Mrs. Ramsay seems only possible with a narrative of this nature: by looking at one person over and over through different eyes, readers get to the depth of her identity, and are able to understand what a fluid thing that is.

Elements of Style

Elements of Style by Wendy Wasserstein

This book came to me by way of Cynthia Nixon’s narration on the audio version. Being a big Sex and the City fan, and long-curious about Wendy Wasserstein, I picked up the CDs for a trip between LA and San Francisco. It’s the kind of novel that’s perfectly suited to long hours of fifth gear: that is, it’s distracting, entertaining, and light enough to keep your attention on the road.

Named after Strunk & White’s famous how-to grammar guide, Elements of Style sets out to explore the notion that style creates content, using label-conscious New York as its petri dish. The novel reads like a modern-day Jane Austen novel, cataloging the social mores of Manhattan’s most elite ladies-who-lunch. Readers get high-society’s variations on the standard archetypes. We get a villain: Judy Tremont–social climber, gossip monger, back stabber; a hero: Frankie Weissman–Park Avenue pediatrician who caters to Fifth Avenue and Harlem children alike; and anti-hero: Samantha Acton–socialite thoroughbred who sets the style standard for the crowd, and the emotional temperment for the readers. And Wasserstein goes to great lengths to be as label-conscious as her ladies, down to the last Birkin bag.

Set a year after the 9/11 attacks, Wasserstein’s Park Avenue trend-setters are nearly unaffected by the changing city (with the exception of beefed-up security at a “ghetto-fabulous” themed charity event in Brooklyn). The characters’ relative remove from the attacks, and their increasing obsession with discussing them at dinner parties, provides a unique commentary on a value system itself underfire–materialistic, insulated, and American. The novel, however, doesn’t delve too deeply into politics (except social ones). Once readers have been lured into the world of the fabulously weathly and marginally famous, they are steered through a second half filled with obvious turns and semi-precious tragedies.
Despite a somewhat flaccid plot, Wasserstein treats her characters with an interesting mix of tenderness and social criticism, making their catty scandals equally captivating and anthropological. This is an fun read, and if you have a long car trip ahead of you, make sure to pack it in your Birkin.

The Devil’s Teeth

The Devil’s Teeth, by Susan Casey (Henry Holt, 2005)

Here’s a tip: read this book.

Bonus tip: Do yourself a favor and don’t read this book on the plane to Hawaii.

The Devil’s Teeth is a non-fiction account of great white sharks and the researchers who study them, and aside from the breathtaking fear I felt every time I got in the ocean after reading it, or perhaps because of that fear, the book made a great impression on me.

What I learned from Devil’s Teeth: only amateurs call them “great white sharks.” Researchers call them white sharks. Really. Can you imagine scientists adding adjectives to other species? Neat blue sharks. Splendid mako sharks. Wide nurse sharks. Not so much, right? Right.

I learned a lot more about great whites, which I fruitlessly applied during my Hawaii visit, but much of the wonder that Devil’s Teeth delivers comes from the fact that scientists know very little about white sharks. (“Great whites.”)

Susan Casey — former creative director for Outside magazine, former editor at Sports Illustrated, and current editor at Time — takes as her leaping-off point a BBC documentary, Great White Shark, which followed the research of two extraordinarily dedicated scientists working on the Farallones islands.

Those two researchers — Peter Pyle and Scot Anderson — discovered that the Farallones were a unique habitat for great whites. The two found that every fall, just 27 miles west of San Francisco, dozens of great whites gathered around the islands, feeding off the many flavors of seal that beached on the rocky islands. Far from being the solitary, lone hunters that the world imagined, the Farallones shark community showed that not only would the same sharks return year after year (or, in the case of female great whites, every other year), but that they would congregate and in the same territory — males on the southwest side of the islands, females on the northeast.

The sharks are the reason Casey followed this story (and she follows it to great lengths and for several years), but the Farallones themselves — crumbling, rocky outcroppings buried in unpredictable and destructive seas — are the devil’s teeth of the title. It’s the lure of these islands, off-limits to all but a handful of researchers, a safe haven for endangered species, that brings Casey to the hunt in the first place. Well, actually, a BBC documentary from 2000 put her on the trail, but after her first visit, Casey got hooked.

Devil’s Teeth is a riveting tale, with enough close encounters with sharks to keep you on edge, but it’s also a rich history of the Farallones islands, and a fascinating look at a unique location at a crucial time — while Casey is reporting Devil’s Teeth, the islands undergo major changes and increasing encroachment by tour guides and spectacle-hungry sightseers.

When Casey writes about the characters in Devil’s Teeth — human, animal and mineral alike — you can feel her passion for the story. It’s a classic piece of journalism, exhaustively researched, structured in a way that pulls you from chapter to chapter, and it’s a breeze and a joy to read. If we were in a book club, I’d have some beefs to raise about the last third of the book, but until you’ve read it, I’m not about to ruin the ending. So go pick it up, take a trip to Kansas or Wyoming or some other similarly land-locked locale, and rip through this book.