snail mail to president obama

Dear Mr. President,

I have never felt compelled to write to someone in your office before, but after hearing you speak to Congress on health care this evening, I simply had to put pen to paper (well, fingers to keyboard, anyway).

I am 32 years old, in overall good health. My brother, J, however, is very ill. Just 30 years old, he suffers from a rare and serious form of multiple sclerosis. Every day is a struggle; there are times when he literally cannot move his limbs, and when the most basic of tasks are impossible. For the last four years, J has endured a cocktail of drugs, from daily injections to monthly infusions of steroids and other chemicals that have helped with the MS but ravaged his body in other ways.

For the moment, my brother enjoys a good job that accommodates his physical ailments and provides private health insurance. But even so, his medical bills are extremely high. He has been denied various treatments despite his desperate state, and he is often forced to go to the emergency room, where out-of-pocket costs are exorbitant. But perhaps scariest of all, Mr. President, is that my brother lives in Massachusetts, the one state in the Union that assures health insurance for all. What of all the other Americans, suffering day in and day out as he does, who can’t get any coverage at all based on their condition, which will never go away and will therefore be “pre-existing” for the rest of their lives?

To be sure, I didn’t write to burden you with another sob story. What I am writing with is my message that you must pass this health care bill. This may be the fight of our time, but it is one that simply cannot fail. I urge you to continue to reach out to our young people, to educate them about how government works for them. One of the biggest problems I see with American politics today is that the right aims to keep its followers down. They want to keep information out of the hands of those who most need it. You and I both know that it’s the poor and uneducated who have most at stake with this bill—and who least understand it. It’s an unfortunate state of affairs when fear is the driving factor holding up as important a bill as this one. And so I urge you to keep fighting the good fight.

Thank you for all the hope you inspire in so many of us.

Sincerely,

MW

august

You feel it long before you see it
The faintest of breezes gives your
   cheek momentary pause
The hairs on your arm sway,
   ever so slightly,
   as wheat in an Iowa field
A rumble, low and steady
Perks your eardrums alive
Ahhhh: a driving wind
Small relief from the thick fog of August heat
Excitement grows as a thunder draws
   nearer and nearer
You avert your eyes to delay
   impending joy

The train!
Is here!

Now get to work

jordi sabater pi (1922 - 2009)

Unless you live in Spain or are connected to the world of ethology, you've probably never heard of Jordi Sabater Pi, who died last week at the age of 87. Yet he was one of the most successful and influential Spanish primatologists of the 20th century.

Born in Barcelona in 1922, Sabater Pi traveled to the former Spanish colony of Equatorial Guinea when he was just 17. There, he decided to research the local rainforest fauna, which included various species of great ape. He taught himself the Fang language and gained the nickname of "the person who never drinks water" among the friends he made there. He went on to study in other parts of Africa, at which time he made some crucial discoveries about primate behavior. One of his most important finds was that chimpanzees in the Okorobiko mountains transmitted cultural information from one generation to the next, and in particular used sticks to maintain community ties. In Rwanda, Sabater Pi also worked with primatologist Dian Fossey; the two collaborated in a study of mountain gorillas.

Despite decades of work and dozens of scientific publications, Sabater Pi is probably best known for his role in finding the only albino gorilla known to modern science. In 1962, he was the director of the Ikunde Zoological Adaptation and Experimentation Center in Guinea when a group of locals told him that they'd found a rare animal in the bush. The men had killed a mother gorilla who was supposedly threatening their crops, and they soon realized she had been holding a single baby the color of snow. Sabater Pi purchased the orphan, who would go on to become the most famous resident ever to reside at the Barcelona Zoo. He was named Floquet de Neu, which means "Snowflake" in Catalan, and he lived for close to 40 years until his death in 2003.

Aside from his fieldwork and later duties as a professor at the University of Barcelona, Sabater Pi enjoyed drawing. A collection of his nature sketches—along with thousands of his documents and photographs—can be seen at the Barcelona Science Park in Spain. For those of you who speak Catalan, this interview, which he gave just over a year ago, provides a wealth of information about his background, achievements, and personal thoughts. ∞

to the moon(s)

Today marks the 40th anniversary of the first human steps on the giant orb that lights our skies at night and captivates our collective imagination. And of course, in this instant news age of Twitter and blog reporting (ahem), it's no surprise that pretty much every media outlet is covering the event—and that businesses are using any angle they can to cash in.

But what was surprising to me about the day in question, July 20, 1969 (N.B. it was already July 21st in the U.K. and points east when Neil Armstrong put his boot down), was that the only way people could really follow along was via radio. I'd heard stories of people watching the news on television that night and of feeling glued to the set as the reports came in. Yet until yesterday, when, prompted by the death of newscaster Walter Cronkite I watched the CBS broadcast (see below) for the first time, I had never realized just how in-the-dark the country and the world really was about what was happening. And frankly, it starts to make sense why all these conspiracy theorists might have been so skeptical!

As you can see for yourself, the broadcast included a crude animation of what was supposedly happening as the Eagle landed. And that was it, folks! The only other clue people had that this was actually taking place was the rather anticlimactic radio broadcast between the Eagle astronauts and NASA's Houston command center. Today, of course, we take for granted that it's standard operating procedure for space agencies to provide live video feeds from high-resolution cameras flanking rockets and other spacecraft as they're flung through the atmosphere, into space, and onto the surfaces of other worlds. So it really makes me appreciate just how far we've come since then.


As for our future on the moon, much has been discussed about the next couple of decades of human spaceflight, and I'm somewhat ambivalent about our current direction. Certainly I'd love to see humans achieve ever-more impressive feats and conquer the cosmos one planet at a time. But I'm not sure that setting up a base on the moon is going to be our best way to make that happen. I would definitely want to make sure that programs like Cassini and New Horizons, which are doing advanced scouting to help us figure out which are really the most interesting and worthwhile places to send humans, get properly funded before we start sending people to hang out on the rather dull and relatively uninteresting moon. (Sorry, moon; nothing personal.) Either way, the leaders at NASA and the other space agencies will have a lot of hard questions to answer in the coming years, and I don't envy their difficult task.

For today, though, I think we can all agree that taking a look back at what we've achieved so far makes a lot of sense, especially when old-school science fiction is so much fun! Among other things, this little media frenzy might very well be a career-changing inspiration to a future planetary scientist or astronaut-in-waiting. And who knows? Perhaps that young girl watching a moon special on TV this evening will grow up to be the first person to walk on Enceladus or Titan or Europa—all moons with a lot more promise of life than our cold, yet ever-enchanting, Luna.

the myth of the unbiased judge

The confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor began today, and by all accounts, plenty of senators are ready to dig their heels in and start grilling when the questioning session begins in earnest tomorrow morning. I suppose this is to be expected nowadays, and I'm not particularly concerned that Sotomayor will have any trouble getting confirmed. But I wanted to take a moment to discuss what many believe is going to be a central argument in these proceedings: namely, that a Supreme Court justice (or any court judge for that matter) is supposed to be completely unbiased when deciding his or her rulings.

To this I say: Nonsense.

Justices of the Supreme Court—and indeed of any trial court in the United States—are charged with applying the rule of law as written in the Constitution and the web of Congressional laws passed in the 200-odd years since our country began. As discussed in some detail in yesterday's New York Times, some, including Chief Justice Roberts in his own confirmation hearings, have likened Supreme Court justices to baseball umpires; the idea is that they simply enforce the laws, they don't make them. But everyone knows that judges' decisions are but interpretations of the law. Laws aren't always black or white; if they were, we wouldn't need judges. Indeed, the word "judge" implicitly suggests using one's experiences and understanding of the law to make a conclusion about a given case.

So how do judges make legal decisions? Well, they hear arguments from both sides and look to current laws and judicial precedents to guide them whenever possible. But when precedent is lacking, or when society has changed such that precedents must be rethought, it is personal point of view that necessarily impacts how a judge views the facts of a case. This is indisputable; there would be no "conservative" judges or "liberal" judges otherwise—there would simply be judges. And there wouldn't be any need to question Supreme Court appointees quite so fiercely; everyone would be in agreement about what's right and what's wrong.

Ergo, to complain about a judge drawing on her background to help interpret laws and predict how decisions may play out in the real world is kind of crazy. I guarantee you that every Supreme Court justice has drawn from his or her experiences at one time or another during his or her career. That legal verdicts are also called "opinions" is another etymological clue to the fact that even the Founding Fathers realized that judges would draw from their lives to make decisions.

From everything that's been said so far about Sonia Sotomayor, it seems clear that she's a superb judge who has been as objective as realistically possible in her decisions. Indeed, out of some 400 cases she's decided as an Appellate Court judge, only three were overturned by the Supreme Court—and of those, two were narrow decisions. Sotomayor may be wishing right now that she had refrained from her "wise Latina" comment, but most people forget that immediately before it, Sotomayor declared that "there can never be a universal definition of wise." This was, perhaps, the wisest remark of all. ∞

summer sounds

Well, it's officially summer again, and that means it's time for me to start thinking about making a summer mix! While I ponder the particulars, I thought I'd share a few of the songs I've been obsessing over for the past couple of months. &infin

My Delirium (Ladyhawke): To my mind, Kiwi lass Pip Brown, who goes by the name Ladyhawke, comes off as a hipster, techie version of Stevie Nicks (her voice isn't nearly as witchy, but she does pull off the husky alto rather well). There was a span of two or three days where I think I listened to this song oh, maybe 30 times. And the video is fun...a cross between "Take On Me" and Thelma and Louise.



The Girl and the Robot (Röyksopp feat. Robyn): Maybe it's because I work for a company whose mascot is a robot, but I love the idea of Robyn falling for a real automaton in this collaboration with fellow Scandinavians Röyksopp. The song is addictive, and the video (which happens to share the woman-waiting-in-bedroom theme from "My Delirium") is fantastic.



Gimme Sympathy (Metric): I recently saw Metric in concert, and they were off-the-wall fun. This particular video is rather pedestrian (empty stage, band playing, colorful lights, yadda yadda), but the song is fresh, and I love it. I dare you to blast it into your earbuds or car stero and not start bopping your head.



Graveyard Girl (M83): I've written of my adoration of M83 on these pages before, but it definitely bears repeating! This song is a holdover from last year, but it simply does not get old. It's the perfect addition to any summer mix.

revolution within

With all that is going on in Iran right now following the country's recent controversial elections, many people are struggling to understand the historical background of these fast-changing current events. To that end, I thought it would be a good time to recommend a work that I've been a fan of for some time now: Persepolis, by Marjane Satrapi.

Persepolis is an autobiographical account of an independent-minded Iranian girl (Satrapi) growing up at a time of great political unrest. But unlike most autobiographies, Persepolis is told in black-and-white comic form, which makes the story at once approachable and timeless. The book centers around Satrapi's life as part of a relatively well-educated and progressive Iranian family before and after the 1979 Iranian Revolution. Not only does Satrapi give context for understanding what happened and how Iranian society transformed in the aftermath, but she also does a wonderful job of offering a unique and eye-opening view of what it was like being an inquisitive, punk-loving female in an often repressive, male-centric society. I actually had the pleasure of hearing Satrapi as part of a panel discussion with fellow graphic artist Chris Ware this past winter, and she was an incredible speaker—every bit as animated and full of life as her character in the books and film!

So far there have been four Persepolis books published in French; all four have been translated and compiled into one U.S. publication called The Complete Persepolis. It's a fast read, and I recommend it as an excellent addition to any bookshelf. Alternately, the book was adapted into a motion picture in 2007 (it won the Jury Prize at Cannes and was nominated for an Academy Award), so Netflixing it is certainly a worthwhile option! Although Persepolis may not delve into the most current goings-on in Iran, it will give audiences young and old a substantive background with which to begin further research into that country's recent past. &infin

Update: A new online version of Persepolis, which uses Satrapi's illustrations (with her permission), has been created to address the events of the recent election. It is called Persepolis 2.0.

lovable losers

Oh, Mets. This season, my New York Metropolitans have found every way imaginable to lose. Forgetting to slide at home plate? Check. Thrown out at third for the last out? More than once! Missing third base on the way home? You betcha. Dropping a routine pop up against the boys in pinstripes with two outs in the bottom of the ninth, and letting the tying and winning runs score in the process? Holy mother of—

But then, you have to take a step back and think of the bigger picture. Hey, we did well just to get back into that game! How many other times have we laid down and died from the third inning onward? At least the Phillies lost, too! In the broadcast afterward, you could tell that the sportscasters—several of them former Mets themselves—were literally at a loss of words for this latest, most humiliating debacle. Others were downright angry: These guys get paid millions of dollars to drop pop-ups? They'll try harder tomorrow?!

It is not easy being a fan of the New York Mets. For one thing, we've had more than our share of disastrous seasons, despite our large payroll. But for another thing, we will always, always play in the shadow of our crosstown neighbors, the New York Yankees. Sure, there are plenty of Yankee haters in the world. But most of them don't have to share the same subway car, the same cubicle, the same line at the Shake Shack, as so many of those smug Yankee fans—many of whom, i will point out, have no real reason to root for the Yankees other than the fact that they are the darlings of the baseball world. I mean, come on, how can Hillary Clinton, who's a Cubs fan first and foremost, just pick up and start rooting for an American League team once she moves to New York? It's called front-running. And it's annoying.

As I made my way into the kitchen after this incredulous loss tonight, I almost wished we could go back to the old days, when the Mets were lovable losers. We'd all just shrug and smile. This story from Wikipedia warmed my heart:

How bad were the Mets those first several seasons? Absolutely terrible. On May 26, 1964, in Chicago, they played like champions (at least for one game) and pummeled the Chicago Cubs, 19-1. According to legend, later that day a fan called a New York newspaper to get the score. He was told: "They scored 19 runs." There was a long silence, then the fan asked: "Did they win?"

Then a friend of mine, a fellow die-hard, emailed me, and of course he had some good points:

What can you do but laugh? If that wasn't the most ridiculous loss in Met history, I don't know what was, but it probably involved Marv Throneberry. The truth is, it's a simple example of who the Mets are vs. who the Yankees are. We are fated to suffer bizarre indignities, and the Yankees are fated to capitalize on the bizarre indignities that befall others. It was inevitable that at some point we would lose a game to them in ridiculous fashion. They have Jeffrey Maier catching Jeter's ball; we have Zeile's hit bouncing off the top of the wall as Timo dogs it around second. They have Rivera; we have Benitez. Even this year, it's been evident—they have Melky Cabrera delivering 100 walkoff hits, while we have Ryan Church forgetting to touch third base.

Whether we knew it or not at the time, this is what we signed up for when we became Met fans. So when we reach the inevitable confluence of our destinies, what else can we do but laugh? This is who we are, this is our heritage. We share it with each other, and we all know EXACTLY how it feels. We may be doomed, but we'll never be alone.

I guess that's the only comfort I can take right now. I know it's just one game out of the entire season. And I guess I'll get over this cruel shame that creeps in knowing that at least half of Yankee nation is laughing at you. But I suppose that's what makes true Mets fans what they are. You win some, you lose some, and then you laugh at Bobby V getting fined for his Groucho clubhouse disguise. I can't believe it's been 10 years since that happened, by the way...The good old days, already? I'm getting old. ∞