Archive for the ‘print’ Category
Harper’s Magazine: A Prince Among Thieves
Read my Harper’s annotation: A Prince Among Thieves
LA Weekly: The Sweet, Geeky Spiderman
TALL, SKINNY AND SHY, VYGANDAS Relys is a young Lithuanian arachnidologist who spent most of Memorial Day weekend in a state of mild shock. He was manning the desk at the first ever Los Angeles Spider Survey — which means he spent the day taking vials and bottles and cups of spiders out of young children’s hands and trying hard to identify the species. He was shocked for a lot of reasons. First, he thought almost nobody would show up with spiders and, instead, hundreds and hundreds did, forming a long line of parents and grade-school kids clutching their specimen containers. He was also shocked at being forced to identify species outside of his lab. “Usually, we have microscopes,” he said to one parent who was demanding the identification of a spider curled up at the bottom of a pill bottle; it might be a sack spider or a ground spider and he just couldn’t tell, he tried to explain. He only left Vilnius a few months ago and he’s just getting to know L.A.’s spider species. “In Lithuania, I could do this with my eyes. Here I have to go through the literature,” he said, his hand flipping through an imaginary spider book.
Ultimately, he’s just shocked to be here at all. In January, he was an up-and-coming professor at the most prestigious university in Lithuania. (“I made my Ph.D. in Salzburg,” he said, in a tone suggesting that Salzburg is the world’s capital of advanced arachnid studies.) And then his wife was offered a post-doc fellowship in biochemistry at UCLA. “I had no choice,” he said, clearly wishing he had.
LA Weekly: The Story Behind Fluffy-Gray Kitten
“Fluffy Gray Kitten” is a photograph of a straggly-haired blue-gray kitten with white paws and chest. The cat, borrowed from a Glendora pet store, leans on a log and is backlit so that a halo of bright light appears behind it, and its hair appears fuzzier — fluffy. Its head is cocked to the side, and it has that serious, confused look that kittens get when they pause for a moment from being completely silly and frantic. You’ve seen this kind of photo countless times: on posters, calendars and gift cards, and on the sweaters and mugs of some obsessive cat lady in your office. This type of image is so familiar that it’s nearly impossible to judge any single example, like this one, on its own merits. You see it and, if you think of it at all, you just say to yourself, “There’s another one of those cat pictures.” But this particular picture of the fluffy gray kitten was judged, carefully, and it won the gold medal at the most prestigious amateur photo contest in the country. The award made its creator — Joanne Stolte, a business consultant to ophthalmologists — so proud that she could only scream and jump around when she found out she won.
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Harper’s Magazine: Working Stiffs
Copyright Harper’s Magazine Foundation Aug 2001
What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything, and the value of noting.
-Oscar Wilde
“A wrongful death is worth a base amount,” says George Marr, holding his hand at chest level.
“But if the guy coaches Little League, that’s good,” Ed Quinn adds as George’s hand springs up to chin height.
“He’s got two little girls,” George says.
“And they’re cute.”
“They’re cute,” George repeats. “Boom.” His hand goes above his head.
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Metropolis Magazine: The LA River, Wild and Free?
Stand on any corner in Los Angeles and ask a few passersby about the Los Angeles River; you’ll learn a lot about the city. Most, like Cris Beam, will say, “River? There’s no L.A. River.” A handful, like architect Dean Larkin, know the river well. “It makes me sad,” he says. “Other cities and towns are built around these beautiful rivers. Our river is a concrete scar. I always thought the term river was loosely applied.”
A few like 
it for its perverse industrial nature. “I first realized the L.A. River was cool when I was a kid and the game show Truth or Consequences had a competition,” says television writer Alexa Junge. “A guy in a man-made boat had to get from some point in L.A. to the ocean via the river. Another guy got to go on a cruise from L.A. to San Diego. They would show the guy on the cruise with women in bikinis serving him grapes, and then they would show this other guy in a wagon in the concrete river.”
Since the city was settled in 1781-and it was settled there because of the waterway-the L.A. River has been treated worse than just about any natural landscape in the country. It has been water faucet, sewer, dumping ground, and gravel provider. As L.A. grew, the river outlived its usefulness, and its sporadic nature-dry for half the year and then sometimes flooding violently in the winter-became untenable. So its earthen bed was replaced with a 51-mile-long concrete flood channel hidden below a nearly constant maze of highway overpasses. The only people who seem to visit it these days are graffiti taggers and anyone who needs to get rid of a dead car, an old fridge, or a broken air conditioner.
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Metropolis Magazine: Imagining Buildings Made Entirely of Glass
Tim Macfarlane holds a thick book in his hand. “This has everything you need to build a building,” he says. “It tells you how to use steel, brick, timber, concrete. It has everything except for glass.” The book of standards he’s holding, found on every engineer’s shelf, explains how much weight a support material can carry. Without it, an engineer is blind, with no idea how to arrange things so a bridge, a building, or a house stays standing. With it, an engineer can build almost anything. Macfarlane dreams of the day when this book will contain one of the strongest, most versatile, most exciting materials known to man. He hopes that in the future every good engineer will be able to build with glass.
The 49-year-old Scottish structural engineer says we are just beginning to understand what glass can do. Macfarlane’s recent breakthroughs prove that architects and engineers can now create structures entirely of glass. There is no longer a need to have any other material holding a building up; he imagines suspension bridges held by glass chains, or a gigantic geodesic dome of pure glass surrounding a college campus or an entire city. “That’s just waiting to be done,” he says. “You could build all of Buckminster Fuller’s structures [out of glass].”
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Rolling Stone Magazine: The Joy of No Sex
Tim Nagle happily recites the rules. Masturbation is out; so is public kissing. If he massages his girlfriend’s back, he has to stay above the shoulder blades. If he has sex, he could be expelled. Nagle is a junior at Chicago’s Moody Bible Institute, where these sorts of sexual regulations are nothing new – in fact, they’ve been part of a good evangelical Christian education for centuries. What is new is that now students like Nagle can at least talk about sex.
“I think it’s funny,” he says. “In the Fifties, it was kept quiet: Ooh, sex is bad,’ and all that. In the Eighties, it was fear: `You shouldn’t do it or you’ll get all the diseases.’ It took all the fun out of it. That wouldn’t have worked with me. Now, we’re being real with sex as a beautiful thing. We’ve gotten smarter. I’m very pleased.”
Chicago Tribune: Impact Statements Accidents Will Happen, Again And Again, For Those Who Re-create Them In Insurance Cases
There is nothing sudden or violent about Dwayne “Red” Owen. A large man with a ready smile under a thin white beard, Owen suggests Santa Claus puttering around the house a few days after Christmas. As many of his clients will tell you, it takes a man like Owen–gentle and patient–to sort through the snarl of burned and crushed cars, mangled trucks and broken bodies that are often the only evidence that remains after a traffic accident.
Owen is an accident reconstructionist, based in Champaign. He finds out what went wrong and who is at fault when motor vehicles smash into each other.
“You go to a scene, it’s total chaos and you’re the person who organizes it and straightens things out,” Owen explained with pride.
Metropolis Magazine: NASA Turns Its Lenses on Our Planet
Dale Quattrochi likes to tell people that parking lots wreak havoc on the weather. He points to the man-made stuff all around–asphalt, concrete, tar, metal–and explains that because of parking lots, streets, and sidewalks, because of the roofs of cars, buildings, and houses, because of all this dark stuff coating urban surfaces, cities are much hotter than they should be. These materials absorb the sun’s energy and concentrate its heat; above every city in the world rises an invisible plume of heat, an “urban heat island” several degrees hotter than the surrounding area. These higher temperatures devastate air quality. They provoke thunderstorms in clouds that would otherwise be placid. They make life less bearable and cost millions of dollars in electricity every year.
People have known about the heat island effect since an amateur climatologist named Luke Howard walked around London with a thermometer in 1818. Since then, scientists have found that cities are heated by a lot of very small things spread all over town. Of course, no one has been able to determine how much heat every object adds; such an undertaking would be impossible. But, according to Quattrochi, only a thorough analysis of an entire city can provide the kind of information that urban planners, architects, and others can use to cool cities off.
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Chicago Tribune: Locust-pocus Nino Ramirez Followed His Heart To Study The Brain, And He’s Learning Amazing Things From Insects And Mice
Jan-Marino (Nino) Ramirez was never supposed to be a scientist. His father said he was destined to become a pianist or a painter. The father, Antonio Maro, is a celebrated Peruvian-born European painter, famous for wild abstract work with a barely hidden sexuality. Maro taught his three sons to place the creation of beauty above all other things, and Nino’s brothers did just that: Alexander-Sergei is a popular classical guitarist and Rafael still lives with their father, painting by his side every day.
Nino became a scientist who studies how the brains of mice control their breathing.
Nino’s father said this work was boring. He said Nino had none of the passion and imagination of his brothers and his father. He said he was ashamed of his son.