Commentary

From Ph.D. to Escort: How Debt Can Change Students

Massive indebtedness changes a person, maybe even more than a college education does, and it’s reasonable to suspect that the politicos who have allowed the tuition disaster to take its course know this. To saddle young people with enormous, inescapable debt—total student debt is now more than one trillion dollars—is ultimately to transform them into profit­-maximizing machines. I mean, working as a schoolteacher or an editorial assistant at a publishing house isn’t going to help you chip away at that forty grand you owe. You can’t get out of it by bankruptcy, either. And our political leaders, lost in a fantasy of punitive individualism, certainly won’t propose the bailout measures they could take to rescue the young from the crushing burden.

What will happen to the young debtors instead is that they will become Homo economicus, whether or not they studied that noble creature. David Graeber, the anthropologist who wrote the soon-to-be-classic Debt: The First 5,000 Years, likens the process to a horror movie, in which the zombies or the vampires attack the humans as a kind of recruitment policy. “They turn you into one of them,” as Graeber told me.

Actually, they do worse than that. Graeber relates the story of a woman he met who got a Ph.D. from Columbia University, but whose $80,000 debt load put an academic career off-limits, since adjuncts earn close to nothing. Instead, the woman wound up working as an escort for Wall Street types. “Here’s someone who ought to be a professor,” Graeber explains, “doing sexual services for the guys who lent her the money.”

The story hit home for me, because I, too, wanted to be a professor once. I remember the waves of enlightenment that washed over me in my first few years in college, the ecstasy of finally beginning to understand what moved human affairs this way or that, the exciting sense of a generation arriving at a shared sensibility. Oh, I might have gone on doing that kind of work forever, whether or not it made me rich, if journalism had not intervened.

It’s hard to find that kind of ecstasy among the current crop of college graduates. The sensibility shared by their generation seems to revolve around student debt, which has been clamped onto them like some sort of interest-bearing iron maiden. They’ve been screwed—that’s what their moment of enlightenment has taught them.

To read the rest of Thomas Frank’s Easy Chair column on college tuition, subscribe to Harper’s Magazine for $16.97 per year. If you’re already a subscriber, you can sign in or register for access to the article, along with 162 years of Harper’s.

The Death and Life of 1230 N. Burling

The last tower to stand at Cabrini-Green, a fifteen-story high-rise known by its address, 1230 N. Burling Street, was opened in 1962 and torn down in 2011. There were 134 families living there at its peak occupancy, then fewer than fifty, and, for a short time before its demolition last year, only the household of Annie Ricks, her children bouncing balls in their top-floor unit, blaring music, with no neighbors around to object. On the Cabrini-Green Facebook page, former residents reconnect, posting competing memories of the movies that were projected onto 1230 Burling’s façade, the unlicensed candy store that was operated out of a first-floor apartment, or the slick jackets they wore as members of the Junior Police Explorers.

In 1981, a group of teens who had formed a band convened a practice in 1230 Burling’s downstairs rec room. Maybe the kid with the .357 Magnum mistook the drummer, Larry Potts, for someone else; pointing the gun into an open window, he shot Potts in the head. Not long after, Cora Moore and nine other residents, almost all of them women, started a tenant patrol, hoping to push out gang members who had been charging residents to ride the elevators. They sat up nights in the lobby, replaced hallway lights, and repaired fire doors. Eventually, the Department of Housing and Urban Development trained them as professional security guards. They were even paid for their efforts. Then, under a Reagan initiative, they signed a contract with the Chicago Housing Authority to manage the building themselves, handling 1230 Burling’s security, maintenance, tenant screening, and leasing. Their mission statement proclaimed, “We, the residents of the 1230 North Burling Resident Management Corporation, will provide management programs and services, social, educational, cultural, and spiritual, to better the lives and conditions of the 1230 North Burling residents.” Urine still sometimes pooled in the stairwells and elevators could go unfixed, but the building was relatively functional, generally considered cleaner and better operated than the other Cabrini towers, standing in opposition to the argument that high-rise public housing could never succeed.

From 1999 to 2007, several members of the Revolutionary Communist Youth Brigade, all of them white men, took up residence in a second-floor apartment, joining the tenants’ fight to stave off redevelopment while subscribing to the Maoist maxim to “be in close contact with the people.” During that time, a video shot from an upper-floor apartment captured police officers as they punched and kicked four handcuffed tenants outside the building. Angry residents emerged from the tower, and additional officers arrived from the precinct across the street to combat what was turning into a riot. One of the beaten men, Dave Anderson, who was thirty at the time, sued the city and eventually won a settlement. A girlfriend had once stabbed Anderson in the belly outside a Cabrini grocery store, but nothing like this had happened to him before. He and the others had returned home after a funeral and were just sitting in a parked van when the police yanked them out, maced them, and started whaling away.

A 150,000-square-foot Target is now going up at 1230 N. Burling. A few former tenants are hoping to land jobs building the store or working in it once it has opened. Its customers will include some four hundred Cabrini-Green residents living in new mixed-income developments nearby, as well as those who remain at the 150 rehabbed Cabrini row houses a couple of blocks to the south. Kenneth Hammond, who raised his children in 1230 Burling, relocated to one of the row houses in the months before the building came down. A tenant leader, he told me he had lived at Cabrini-Green all of his forty-two years and never thought about leaving, since he wanted to make the community strong right here. Looking at the 1230 Burling site in disbelief, he said, “All of this for a Target.”

The Real Lives of Italian Dubbers

Whenever Italians catch the sound of Cristina Boraschi’s voice, they insist that she complain about “slippery little suckers” like Julia Roberts in the escargot scene from Pretty Woman. Ferruccio Amendola used to go about Rome reciting the ’fanculo scene from Taxi Driver—his fans created a medley of his best fuck-yous on Facebook after he died. Tonino Accolla, meanwhile, has conquered generations of bartenders near Rome’s Technicolor studios by laughing like Eddie Murphy in Beverly Hills Cop. Unfortunately, laughs didn’t pay Accolla’s 1,000-euro tab for caffes and aperitivos. The bartenders at the café where he ran up this bill were was so upset they asked the satirical TV show Le Iene to track Accolla down (see the video on this page, starting at the 2:30 mark). Confronted with the bill by one of the show’s hosts, Accolla, whose personal habits have been much gossiped about in Italy, admitted that he had spent most of his dubbing money. Then he drove off in his Austin Mini.

America the Bruttiful

During the 1990s, the film critic and dubbing scholar Claudio G. Fava worked for Rai Television, for whom he imported the manic American soap opera The Bold and the Beautiful—titling it simply Beautiful. If you didn’t live in Italy in the Nineties you can’t possibly understand the Beautiful phenomenon, known by some as the Bruttiful (Uglyful) phenomenon because it transformed Italians into American-power-obsessed zombies. Houses grew silent at lunchtime as episodes aired, with families gathering religiously around dining tables with their TVs turned on. Children’s afternoon sports classes were carefully timed so no one would miss a scene from Eric Forester’s compound, and waves of new parents named their babies Brooke, Ridge, or Thorn, after the soap’s protagonists.

In 1994, the first year I lived in the United States, my friends back in Rome forced me to fax them plot summaries of the episodes airing in America so they would know in advance what would happen to who. America was hundreds of episodes ahead, so the information didn’t help them much—some characters from the American episodes hadn’t yet been born on the Italian dubs.

Beautiful’s success in Italy derived, I suspect, from the grand voices of the Forrester family. Their sound—so regal and controlled—told us that everything we suspected about America was true: it was a place where good and evil were two distinct forces working against each other, and where people were fashionable and rich. Dubbing directors were careful to pick voices that matched the mythological characteristics of the actors they played. Ridge Forester, the sensitive playboy played by Ron Moss, was given the sexy, husky voice of Claudio Capone; the combination of Moss’s physical charisma and Capone’s voice created a kind of American–Italian sex god. Capone’s voice, Fava told me, was so fetishized by Italian women that the actor had to change his home phone number because they were calling him obsessively just to hear his voicemail message.

Potter’s Day

The success of a foreign movie in Italy depends on its ability to transfer the spirit of another language into Italian. Italy’s best dubbing director and adapter, Francesco Vairano, is known for his ability to work with films thought to be undubbable and unadaptable, such as the French hit comedy Bienvenue chez les Ch'tis, which relies for much of its humor on misunderstandings between French-speakers and speakers of the regional Picard (or Ch'ti) language. Vairano has also directed dubbings of English period films, like Kenneth Branagh’s full-text Hamlet and last year’s Best Picture Oscar-winner, The King’s Speech.

A purist, Vairano has tenaciously maintained the original Italian voices throughout the entire Harry Potter saga. One of the original voice actors for the series, Giulio Renzi Ricci, who plays Ron Weasley, is now twenty-three and living in London, where he works in finance. Vairano has convinced him to come back every for every film in the series—a gratifying feat for Italy’s legions of obsessive Potter fans, who invited the voice team to Harry Potter’s Day in Veneto every year from 2004 to 2009. The festival, the first European gathering for Potter fans, was considered culturally relevant enough in Italy for the government to spend money funding it. Featuring talent shows, workshops, and a look-alike competition, the highlight of the event was traditionally the dubbers’ performance:

Mapping Out May Day

Detail from http://lifewinning.com/M1/m1gmaps.html. Marked are media institutions (yellow), banks and financial institutions (green), major real estate figures (purple), political institutions (red), and police precincts (blue).

 

Nathan Schneider’s story “Some Assembly Required,” which traces the birth of Occupy Wall Street, appeared in the February 2012 issue of Harper’s Magazine.

With exactly a week left before May Day, Occupy Wall Street organizers were coming and going from an East Village townhouse. In the basement, enormous banners were being painted for “mutual aid” stations. Upstairs, Ingrid Burrington and Chris Longenecker, both in their mid-twenties, sat on meditation cushions on the hardwood floor of a room where Longenecker and three other Occupiers were living. The walls were covered with posters calling for a general strike, and a record player was spinning an Allman Brothers album. Covering the floor in front of Burrington and Longenecker were intricate maps of New York that Burrington had obtained from the Department of City Planning, then had laminated. As her computer attempted to process a data trove related to the NYPD’s “stop and frisk” policy, she explained to Longenecker how to transfer information from a spreadsheet to the JavaScript code that controls a Google map.

“Does that make sense?” she asked.

“It doesn’t completely not make sense,” he replied.

Since January, Occupy Wall Street’s Direct Action Working Group has been preparing a carnival of resistance for the traditional workers’ holiday of May 1. In addition to plastering the city with posters advertising a general strike for May Day, the members of Direct Action, including anarchists like Longenecker, have helped forge a coalition of community, immigrant’s rights, and labor organizations, joining their partners in spreading the more modest call to “Legalize, Unionize, Organize,” and in planning an afternoon march from Union Square to Wall Street. Starting at eight in the morning, midtown Manhattan will be clogged with teams of “99 Pickets” marching to sites of 1 percent power.

Longenecker had already begun marking these sites on the laminated maps with colored markers: police precincts in blue, pickets that might involve arrests in red, and safer ones in green. Each pickets was numbered, so that the clandestine control center for the march could coordinate the day’s actions. “This has way more moving parts than anything we’ve ever done before,” said Longenecker.

It was fortunate, then, that Burrington was around. “I’m only good at two things,” she’d told me a few weeks earlier, as she showed me a map in Adobe Illustrator of police patrol routes for Union Square. “Organizing large amounts of data in useful ways, and making pies.” Burrington started making maps as a student at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. Charting that city’s patchwork of neighborhoods, with its stark divisions between black and white, rich and poor, she’d come to appreciate the political nature of cartography—how maps shape people’s experience of space and how they thereby wield power over that experience. She later edited a diagrammatic newspaper, the Schematic Quarterly.

She was surprised, when she got involved with Occupy Wall Street, at how little the movement was using maps, so she began charting sites of interest: corporate headquarters, privately owned public spaces, accessible bathrooms. “This is entirely a social movement about geography,” she told me. This line of thought places her within a tradition of resistance that includes the Situationists and their experiments in psychogeography, the Czechs who removed street signs to disorient Soviet troops during the Prague Spring, and the Syrians who changed the names of streets and bridges on Google Maps from ones associated with the ruling Assad family to ones honoring the resistance’s heroes.

Other Occupiers have also begun incorporating cartographic concepts and methods into their protests. For several weeks, a small twenty-four-hour occupation has been roving around New York City, staying at such locations as Union Square, sidewalks in front of banks, and, now, the Federal Hall memorial on Wall Street. Organizer Nicole Carty told me she hopes these “sleepful protests” will change the way New Yorkers experience their city. The idea, she said, is “to map, with our bodies, capitalism all over New York.” The roaming protests, along with acts of civil-disobedience like getting arrested for lying down outside the New York Stock Exchange, represent the first lines of this map. Organizers want to see similar actions across the country, marking the influence of Wall Street throughout the United States. They’ve been talking about creating a “Where’s Wall Street?” mobile app that would allow users to map out and discover Wall Street’s tentacles in their own communities.

Occupiers in Los Angeles, where the call for a May Day general strike originated, also used cartography in their planning. To address the challenges of their city’s vast sprawl, they’ve asked activists to converge on the downtown core in caravans of bicycles, cars, and subway trains along four newly conceived arteries—the “Four Winds”—starting in the north, south, east, and west ends of the county. Their hope is that the Winds will become the basis of future organizing after May Day, linking disparate communities in the shape of a bull’s eye around the city’s financial district.

I asked Ingrid Burrington and some of the other May Day organizers in New York what future maps of their city might emphasize, were the Occupy movement to succeed. “Mutual-aid stuff,” one of them suggested. “Where you can go for resources,” Burrington explained. Then she thought of something else: “I think we would probably create monuments and weird new memorials.” The November 15 police raid that ended the occupation of Zuccotti Park, she said, had seared certain scenes and places into her memory.

I used to wonder myself during the occupation whether a plaque might someday commemorate its kitchen, library, or General Assembly. A few days before the map-making session with Burrington and Longenecker, I had sat with a group of Occupiers on the steps of the Federal Hall memorial, surrounded by NYPD barricades. One of the activists pointed to a fist-sized gash in the side of a building on the other side of Wall Street. Looking at his phone, he read aloud from a Wikipedia page that explained its cause: a 1920 bombing by Italian anarchists that killed thirty-eight people. It was a quiet reminder that Wall Street had had enemies before. The gash was unmarked and unmapped; I’d passed by it many times, and had never even noticed it.

An Excerpt From “Byzantium: Their ears were uncircumcised”

The Turkish emir Osman I, father of the Ottoman dynasty, had a dream. A tree sprang from his loins, and from its roots flowed the great rivers of the world, and its canopy spread from the Caucasus to the Atlas. In the branches nightingales and parrots cried out. Every leaf was a scimitar. A wind blew up that turned these blades toward the cities that lay beneath the tree; most turned toward Constantinople. That city became the emerald in a ring, and the emir slipped the ring on his finger, and awoke.

The Byzantines had said that when, as at its founding in A.D. 330, they were again ruled by an emperor named Constantine, son of a Helena, Constantinople would fall, which in 1453 they were and it did.

The Muslims foretold that a leader who bore the Prophet’s name would take Constantinople, and in 1453 he did and he did.

When the Turks at last breached Constantinople’s walls it was because someone left the door open. At the moment they entered the great church of Hagia Sophia, the priest conducting the mass disappeared into the walls. They found a golden door high in the wall but their masons could not open it.

No witness was found to the death of Constantine XI Dragases Palaeologus, and it is not possible to say with certainty how he died that day or by whose hand or even whether he died at all.

What was Byzantium? The Hellenic east of the Roman Empire had been first provincial holdings and then, with the imperium split between West and East, an equal and conjoined power, and then, with the diminishment of the West, became Rome itself, refulgent.

What were its borders, the appearances of its cities? At greatest extent Byzantium comprised Turkey, Egypt, North Africa, Macedonia, Bulgaria, the Levant, the Sinai, Greece, Illyria, and (when the emperor Justinian I briefly retook the West) Italy and Sicily and Corsica and Andalusia. Pagan classicism—marmoreal, monumental, certain of the primacy of earthly life—yielded to Christian abstraction and introspection. Art was now the ornament and not the celebration of a transitory world; the physical would never again be heroic. And yet what, wondered Bishop Porphyry of Gaza, might Heaven hold if this city of Constantinople could be so grand?

Halfway between Heaven and earth were tollbooths where demons taxed the sins of the Byzantines. Byzantium was efficient in Christ, sophisticated, cautious; a splendor enameled and golden. Its minds were hyaline and humorless. The world was twice as long as it was wide. There was no purgatory.

In 628 the emperor Heraclius summoned Mohammed’s cousin Abu Sufyaan, messenger of the messenger of God, and put to him many questions by which he hoped to weigh the authority of the Prophet. He asked: “Has any among your people ever claimed to be a prophet before him?” He was told: “No.” He asked: “Was any among his ancestors a king?” He was told: “No.” He asked: “Is it the noble among the people or the weak who follow him?” He was told: “The weak.” He asked: “Are his followers increasing or decreasing in number?” He was told: “They are increasing.” He asked: “Does he break his promises?” He was told: “No.” Heraclius concluded: “Verily, if what you say is true, he will rule the ground beneath my feet.”

“Verily you shall conquer Constantinople,” Mohammed promised his followers. “But the Byzantines with horns are people of sea and rock; whenever a horn goes, another replaces it. Alas, they are your associates to the end of time.”

The Byzantines called themselves Greeks (because they were) and also Romans (because they had been). To the Muslims, who had been the Arabs (who had coveted Constantinople even before they were Muslims) but were later the Turks, the Byzantines were usually the Romans (Rum) and sometimes, though these Romans spoke Greek, the Latins (which to the Byzantines meant the barbarians of Western Europe), and sometimes the Children of the Yellow One, who was Esau. The Arabs called the Byzantine emperor (who signed his letters in purple ink EMPEROR AND AUTOCRAT OF THE ROMANS) the Dog of the Byzantines, and by the fifteenth century the sultan of the Ottoman Turks (whom the Muslims farther east called Romans and whom the Byzantines called Trojans) called himself sultan i-Rum in expectation that he soon would be and in recognition that he already, for most purposes, was.

In 912, Harun ibn Yahya was taken prisoner by the Byzantines and brought to Constantinople, where he witnessed the emperor in procession from the palace to the great church, followed by fifty-five thousand two hundred and twelve young Khazars and Turks in stripes and middle-aged eunuchs in white and men and youths and boys and servants and patricians in brocade, and “In his hand is a golden box containing dust. He goes on foot. Every two steps he stops, and his minister says the words ‘Remember death,’ and he stops to open the box, look at the dust, kiss it, and weep.”

What were the laws and practices of the lawgivers? The Great Code of Theodosius forbade the impersonation of nuns by female mimes and the trampling of Jews by gentiles; the edicts of Leo VI permitted eunuchs to adopt; the Orthodox patriarchs anathematized the Manichaeans’ belief that all things fermented are alive.

The rulers of Byzantium were accustomed to blinding their rivals. With ornamental eye scoops, with daggers, with candelabras, kitchen knives, and tent pegs, with burning coals and boiling vinegar, with red-hot bowls held near the face and with bandages that left the eyes unharmed but were forbidden to be removed; sometimes it was sufficient merely to singe the eyelashes, for the victim to bellow and sigh like a lion as a trained executioner pantomimed the act. Sometimes cruelty was intended beyond the enucleation itself, as when the emperor Diogenes Romanus was deposed and “they permitted some unpracticed Jew to proceed in blinding the eyes” and “he lived several days in pain and exuding a bad odor.” In 797 the empress regnant Irene blinded her son Constantine VI and caused an eclipse that lasted seventeen days. Basil II blinded fifteen thousand Bulgarian soldiers, and every hundredth man he left with one eye to lead another ninety-nine, and when these men returned home to their king Samuel he looked upon them and died. Michael V blinded his uncle John the Master of Orphans. The iconoclasts blinded the eyes of the icons.

It was said that the city would fall when ships sailed by over dry land.

Constantinople had a thousand churches and insuperable walls landward and seaward. On the main approach to the palace, only the perfume merchants were permitted their trade. In the imperial throne room was a golden tree in whose branches mechanical birds sang and beside which mechanical lions roared. On a fine cushion next to the levitating Throne of Solomon sat a green goose who screamed if the emperor’s meals were poisoned. The emperor alone could pass back and forth through the membrane separating his court from God’s.

Envoys from the Chinese court reported that “there are jugglers who can let fires burn on their foreheads; make rivers and lakes in their hands; raise their feet and let pearls and precious stones drop from them; and, in opening their mouths produce banners and tufts of feathers in abundance”; that there were jade-colored pearls which coagulated in the saliva of flying birds, lambs who sprouted from the ground and had to be startled into breaking their umbilical cords, and dwarves who worked the fields in fear of being eaten by cranes.

The Byzantines sent to the Fatimid court white peacocks, white ravens, and large bears who played music. They performed divination by thunder, lightning, and the moon.

The emperor Leo the Wise prophesied the doom of Constantinople. (The dreams of man may come from God, accorded the science of the Muslims, but they may come also from the Devil, or from man himself.) Leo created a toad, or a marble tortoise, who roamed the streets at night and consumed all the city’s refuse. He built a bathhouse for the poor that was destroyed by its guardian sagittary statue when the bathkeepers began to charge admission.

The emperor Alexius I built within Constantinople a separate city for wretches. The poor were ephemeral, unsurvived by new generations: different persons grew poor and replaced them.

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A New Front in the War Against Malaria

Photograph by Aaron Huey

In October 2007, Bill and Melinda Gates—benefactors of the largest private foundation in the world—stood before a packed audience of public-health experts and government officials in Seattle and announced their intention to free the world of malaria, a disease that has haunted all of human history. It was an audacious objective—one that met with public praise and private skepticism from malariologists who had spent their careers in an often-losing battle.

The Gateses—and $1.75 billion of their money—have been at the vanguard of a newly energized campaign against the mosquito-borne parasites that cause malaria. Remarkable progress has been made in the past decade: in 2000, the World Health Organization estimated that 3,000 people were dying daily from the disease; today, that number is down to 2,000. One of the key pillars of the fight is a multidrug treatment that includes artemisinin, a potent antimalarial derived from sweet wormwood. As such older malaria drugs as chloroquine and pyremethamine have gradually lost their efficacy, malaria-control programs around the world have rolled out an artemisinin-based combination therapy as the frontline treatment. Hailed initially as a magic bullet, the drug has by some estimates saved more than a million people—most of them children in sub-Saharan Africa. Currently, no other drugs exist to replace artemisinin in the public-health arsenal.

As I reported in the April issue of Harper’s Magazine, in 2008 researchers announced that artemisinin resistance was beginning to appear among malaria patients in a remote area of western Cambodia, along the border with Thailand. The possible causes were manifold: the spread of counterfeit antimalarials, inadequate dosages for genuine ones, and a highly mobile and inaccessible population. Fearing disastrous consequences, the Gates Foundation disbursed $22 million for an ambitious program, spearheaded by the WHO, to try and contain the spread of artemisinin resistance.

Now, three years after that containment effort began, and just as some signs of success have been reported, a new study has been published showing that the problem may be far more widespread than previously suspected. The article, published this month in The Lancet, examines the malaria-parasite clearance rates of 3,202 patients treated with artemisinin from 2001 to 2010 along the border of Thailand and Burma, hundreds of miles from the Thai–Cambodian border region where resistance was first observed. While the drug was still able to halt malaria, researchers noted a disturbing trend: cases with a slow clearance rate (a sign that drug efficacy is weakening) increased from 0.6 percent in 2001 to 20 percent in 2010. In other words, drug-resistant malaria had already begun to spread out of the containment zone before researchers were aware of its existence. In as few as two years, the researchers found, resistance rates along the Thailand–Burma border could be as high as the ones Gates and the WHO have spent millions trying to contain in Cambodia. The fate of artemisinin—and the global fight against malaria along with it—is now more tenuous than ever, and the net to contain resistance must be cast farther afield.

These new findings are especially unwelcome because of their location. Cambodia, for all its structural and economic problems (partly a legacy of its civil war), has a very engaged and committed public-health sector, aided by the presence of numerous NGOs. Burma, by contrast, has a poorly funded public-health infrastructure and hosts far fewer international health monitors, an unfortunate consequence of its ostracism by foreign governments during decades of military rule. It also has by far the highest disease burden in Southeast Asia, with nearly half a million malaria cases annually. Furthermore, Burma borders India, which has 1.6 million cases annually; from there, researchers fear, a domino effect of drug-resistance could begin, ultimately reaching the vast parasite pool of Africa, where 90 percent of the world’s malaria cases occur.

The recent parliamentary byelections in Burma, and particularly the landslide victory of former political prisoner Aung San Suu Kyi, have inspired hope for political change there for the first time in decades. The country faces an epic challenge in rebuilding its civil-society institutions, and it is still early to celebrate the junta’s obsolescence. Malaria is not likely atop the priority list. Burma didn’t ask to find itself on the front line of the war against malaria, but if artemisinin and the global health infrastructure that depends on it are to be saved, that is where the fight must now turn.

An Ideal Story Anthology

Afghanistan’s Endless Private-Security War

The week of March 20 was supposed to have been Afghanistan’s first without private-security companies on its soil since the American invasion of 2001. However, a few months ago, the Afghan government delayed for a second time its implementation of Presidential Decree 62, promulgated in August 2010, which called for armed men not under government control to leave by the end of that year. The decree—which covers such notorious foreign contractors as Academi (formerly Xe Services and Blackwater), as well as Afghan ones that are often warlord-run militias branded as businesses—promised an end to the free-for-all that had characterized Afghan security for more than a decade. Lobbying by the American government and its allies persuaded President Hamid Karzai to extend the ostensibly non-negotiable deadline to March 20, however. This date has now passed, and nothing has changed.

The Afghan Public Protection Force (APPF), which consists of government policemen paid by private clients, is still waiting to assume responsibility for the security of development projects, military bases, supply convoys, and VIPs. BBC reports that the APPF has only 6,000 armed Afghans ready to take over these duties from the estimated 40,000 private-security men now in the country. Last September, senior Afghan official Ashraf Ghani told me that “the objective of establishing full Afghan control of security” was the government’s top priority. The state, he insisted, should have a monopoly on force in the country in order for it to be considered independent. His confidence that Decree 62 would be implemented was strong enough for him to tell me that, by this April, either APPF paramilitary police would be guarding all American bases or “the American soldiers themselves will not be there.” Instead, the American forces are still there, and the APPF isn’t. Nor is the APPF providing security for UN or USAID field projects.

With the deadline blown, the Afghan government is now granting extensions to Afghan and foreign security firms to remain in the country for up to ninety days. These extensions are renewable. Presidential Decree 62 is already riddled with more holes than a house blasted by a predator drone, with exceptions that allow for private embassy security and for military firms to rebrand themselves as “risk management” companies. The APPF itself has institutionalized these exceptions, by signing at least sixteen contracts with “risk management” businesses for the oversight of APPF guards. This sleight-of-hand does little more than subcontract the work of the APPF to private-security companies.

The Afghan state, already so weak that it cannot enforce building codes and property ownership rights in Kabul, is competing with NATO troops (whose actions it has condemned), the Taliban (which controls large parts of the country), warlords of the former Northern Alliance, and armed security guards from scores of companies that are unlikely to disappear soon. Decree 62, initiated to prove the government’s determination to provide national security, is instead demonstrating its impotence.

“The Warrior Class”: The Blackwater Videos

The April 2012 issue of Harper’s Magazine includes “The Warrior Class,” a feature by Charles Glass on the rise of private-security contractors since 9/11. The conclusion to the piece describes a series of videos shown to Glass by a source who had worked for the private-security company Blackwater (now Academi, formerly also Xe Services) in Iraq. Clips and photos from the videos are shown below, introduced by Glass’s descriptions:

The first [video], identified as “Baghdad, Iraq, May–­September 2005,” showed Blackwater convoys racing through town. Suddenly, the door of a Blackwater SUV opened and a rifle fired at passing traffic. “They opened the door,” my companion said. “You should never break the seal.”

A still photo showed some graffiti scrawled on a metal beam: THIS IS FOR THE AMERICANS OF BLACKWATER THAT WERE MURDERED HERE IN 2004 SEMPER FIDELIS 3/5 PS FUCK YOU.

The next tape had been taken by a camera in the turret of an armored vehicle. An [M4A1]¹1.

Corrected text. The gun was initially misidentified as an AK47.

fired from the turret at cars that had stopped to let the convoy pass. Whoever was firing the [gun] did so enthusiastically and often, sending rounds into parked cars and an overhead bridge. Another sequence showed a contractor vehicle rear-ending a car, shattering its back windshield.

The footage continued. A Humvee smashed into a car to move it out of the way. Guards swore at passersby. More armored vehicles smashed into civilian cars.

Blackwater helicopters shot at targets below in a Baghdad street.

But what about the tape dated April 1, 2006, which was shot from the front seat of the fourth car in an armored convoy? Driving along a wide boulevard in Baghdad, the lead vehicle swerved close to the curb of a traffic island. A woman in a black full-length burka began to cross the street. The vehicle struck the woman and knocked her unconscious body into the gutter. The cars slowed for a moment, but did not stop, nor did they even determine whether the victim was dead or alive. A voice in the car taking the video said, “Oh, my God!” Yet no one was heard on the radio requesting help for her. Most sickeningly, the sequence had been set to an AC/DC song, whose pounding, metallic chorus declared: “You’ve been… thunderstruck!”

The tape ended with the inscription IN SUPPORT OF SECURITY, PEACE, FREEDOM AND DEMOCRACY EVERYWHERE.

Congratulations to Our 2012 National Magazine Award Finalists

The winners will be announced on May 3.

Six Questions for Alan Lightman

Photograph by Michael Lionstar

Alan Lightman is a professor of physics and humanities at MIT, and the author of novels, poems, and such essays as “The Accidental Universe: Science’s crisis of faith” (December 2011), which was selected as one of 2011’s best magazine features by New York Times columnist David Brooks. Lightman’s latest novel, Mr g (Pantheon), is a witty, playful work that describes what happens when the title character decides, after waking up from a nap, to create the universe. Harper’s Magazine put six questions to Lightman about the novel:

1. In a recent New York Times article, Dennis Overbye discusses the growing number of scientists, including Lawrence Krauss, Richard Dawkins, and Stephen Hawking, who have written about the “mystery of last resort”—the question of what came before the Big Bang to set creation in motion. Most of these writers have assiduously avoided the idea of intelligent design by a deity. In your Harper’s essay “The Accidental Universe,” which also touches on this aversion, you describe theoretical physics as “the outpost of science closest to philosophy, and religion,” and you’ve now published a novel written from the perspective of a God character. What kind of space do you think should exist in nonfiction scientific writing for faith? How do you think belief in a deity affects the pursuit of theoretical physics?

I think that scientific belief and faith, as faith is usually understood, operate in two different domains, with different realms of validity and meaning. (Except for the scientific belief that the laws of nature hold inviolable at every time and place in the universe, which is itself an article of faith.) Science cannot find the answers to such questions as whether it is acceptable to kill people in warfare or whether a particular painting by Rembrandt is “better” than a particular painting by Picasso; similarly, I do not think there is much place for scientific writing about faith.

As for belief in a deity, it should not affect the pursuit of theoretical physics, as long at that belief does not alter the demands of science that all theories be subject to experimental test and that all phenomena are governed by inviolable laws of nature. If a scientist decided to attribute a particular phenomenon to the unrepeatable and miraculous intervention of God, rather than to the workings of the laws of nature, and that attribution prevented the scientist from exploring the latter, then that would be a problem.

2. The characters in Mr g are remarkable for their human-ness; they are not what one would expect from the family of God. The title character’s Uncle Deva and Aunt Penelope, who quarrel and disagree, are more reminiscent of Greek or Norse myth than of the Judeo-Christian tradition, and Mr g himself, while omnipotent, is neither omniscient nor infallible: He makes mistakes, changes his mind, learns from trial and error, and doesn’t foresee every consequence of his actions. The end result is that we see God as almost childlike, learning as he goes along and being lectured by his elders. Why did you want your god characters to be more ordinary than divine?

This is literature, not theology, and as a writer I want my readers to become emotionally involved with the characters. Hence, they must have human qualities. Mr g differs substantially from the gods of most religions in that he is a modest fellow, but although he listens to his elders, he doesn’t always follow their advice; he makes up his own mind about things. And, although he does learn by trial and error, I do not feel that he is childlike. He takes great pleasure in some of his creations and experiments, just as all of us do.

As for Uncle Deva and Aunt Penelope, there is clearly no antecedent for them in the Judeo-Christian tradition. But their interactions with Mr g bring out his character, and their own dialectic reflects the yin and yang of certain ideas: quantitative versus qualitative, rational versus intuitive.

3. Mr g creates many universes, then chooses one of them, Aalam-104729, as the one upon which he will experiment. He gives it three dimensions and three fundamental laws, then leaves the universe and its many worlds to develop on their own. One of the unintended consequences is the creation—a few “logical syllogisms” on from the creation of time and space and matter—of Belhor, the Devil-figure of the book’s cosmology. He serves an important function as an interlocutor and intellectual sparring partner who frequently manages to make Mr g rethink his opinions. While Belhor is sinister, however, he never seems evil or traditionally “devilish.” What made you decide to frame the relationship between Mr g and Belhor in this way, as one almost of equals, rather than opposites?

My Belhor is modeled in part on Mikhail Bulgakov’s wonderful Satan character in The Master and Margarita. Woland combines maliciousness with decency, seriousness with humor, dignity with playfulness. Also, he is neither all good nor all evil, and I liked his high intelligence. Mr g becomes a more interesting character when challenged by someone who is his intellectual equal. In his struggles to understand and frame responses to the difficult questions posed by Belhor, we not only see more deeply into Mr g’s character, we better appreciate the complexity of the questions.

4. The creator of this universe is affected by his creation, as are most writers, scientists, and creators. How did conceiving and writing the novel affect your own understanding of the relationship between faith, science, and philosophy?

What I learned in writing this novel is the complicated nature of moral questions. Does evil have to exist in order to have good? Does free will have to exist in order to have good? These questions, of course, do not have easy answers, and perhaps no answers at all, and I came to appreciate their complexity and ambiguity more in the exchanges between Mr g and Belhor. Their debate about whether evil is necessary for good, for example. Are all qualities definable only in terms of their opposites? Why is it important that people have free will?

5. In addition to the philosophical questions that underlie the book, you also carefully explain much of the science involved, for example the creation of molecules. When writing a book like this, how do you balance the needs of the story against the needs of the argument and the exposition?

The story must be given the upper hand, in all fiction. Henry James once said about fiction writing that the only rule that cannot be broken is that the book or story must be “interesting.” Once the reader loses interest and stops turning the pages, the game is over. Of course, I take delight in putting ideas and scientific facts into a book like this, but I must always make sure that there is sufficient narrative force, suspense, and tension to propel the reader along. Ideas in a novel must be handled very carefully, like high explosives.

6. Near the end of the book, Belhor says that a material mind “is capable of great goodness, and also great evil…. But that is what happens with intelligence.” Mr g asks whether this capability arises from materiality or from intelligence, because he and Belhor have even greater intelligence than even the most intelligent and advanced forms of life. The book doesn’t answer this question, but do you, as a scientist and a writer, have an answer?

My personal answer is that it is intelligence that creates good and evil. Without intelligence, a living creature is simply acting like a robot, getting food, reproducing, responding to its environment, keeping itself alive according to automated procedures. With intelligence comes the ability to place things in context, to weigh one course of action against another, to assign values, to choose to do A or B. In my opinion, it is only against such a complex background that good and evil can be meaningfully defined.

Correction: Letters, April 2012

In “Killing the Competition” [Report, February], Barry C. Lynn expounds on the contraction of open markets in an age of corporate hegemony, comparing the plight of Apple employees in Silicon Valley with that of poultry farmers in the Allegheny Mountains. An even more apt comparison might be with workers at Foxconn and other factories throughout the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone in China, who manufacture the devices that run Apple software. When I interviewed hundreds of Foxconn workers in 2010, I found they were, like the Apple employees interviewed by Lynn, skittish and fearful of being blacklisted.

Unlike most workers in Silicon Valley, those with whom I spoke in Shenzhen seldom have means of changing their lot, but they suffer no delusions. Perhaps, then, they have something to teach those of us who choose not to see the true nature of the corporations we work for or endorse. Lynn’s article reminds us of the naïveté underlying any assumption that regulation will occur naturally rather than through intervention.

John Leonard’s Reading for My Life

Today marks the release of Reading for My Life, a collection of writings by the critic John Leonard, who authored the New Books column for Harper’s Magazine from 2003 until his death in 2008. The book includes reflections from Leonard on writers as varied as Joan Didion, Richard Nixon, and Salman Rushdie, as well as reflections on Leonard by a similarly distinguished cast. The introduction to the anthology is by E. L. Doctorow, who beautifully encapsulates Leonard’s literary calling: “With his love of language and his faith in its relevance to human salvation, our own inadvertent, secular humanist patron saint.”

Harper’s was fortunate to publish this perspective for decades, starting in the 1970s and carrying through to Leonard’s years as author of New Books, a column he made truly his own. When Leonard passed away, Wyatt Mason assessed some of his finest writing, including his body of work for Harper’s, which is available to everyone here.

Leonard’s long-time Harper’s editor, Jen Szalai, recommended that readers begin with his September 2008 New Books column. He was, she writes in her Reading for My Life tribute, a man “who cared so deeply about reading and writing that it was as much a moral and existential activity as it was an intellectual one.”

The DOJ’s Misguided Antitrust Attack

In 1890, Congress passed America’s first federal antimonopoly law, the Sherman Antitrust Act, by an overwhelming margin. The intent was to protect the nation’s markets and break up its concentrations of economic and political power. But almost immediately, the very plutocrats targeted by the law figured out how to turn it to their advantage. It was the unions of the workingman, they said, and the cooperatives of the farmer, that were the truly dangerous cartels. And with some help from business-friendly courts, the big man was made free to use the Sherman Act against the little man.

After twenty years, the American people at last regained some control of this powerful set of laws. And although, in the century since, administrations have often chosen not to enforce those laws, they have also generally resisted attempts to once again turn these laws against the actual victims of power.

Last week, however, President Obama’s Justice Department weighed in on the ongoing fight over who gets to price America’s books—the people who write and publish those books, or Amazon. And rather than target Amazon, which has captured de facto monopoly control over the U.S. market for books, the DOJ threatened the publishers subject to Amazon’s power.

The supposed crime of these companies? To insist on their right to price their own products and compete freely and openly with one another, without being manipulated by a giant trading company serving its own private interests.

What makes the DOJ’s approach especially sad is that its antitrust enforcers apparently mean well. Unlike the appointees of, say, George W. Bush, many, if not most, Obama Administration employees actually seem to want to serve the public interest. Unfortunately, these men and women find their ability to do so warped by an ideology they do not fully understand.

For America’s first 200 years, the aim of our antimonopoly laws was to ensure the safe distribution of power. This was true even during those periods when the law was not being enforced. Then, in the 1970s and 1980s, a strange alliance of corporate libertarians, Galbraithian socialists, and consumer activists concluded that it was better to promote “efficiency” instead, as measured mainly by lower prices.

The real-world result? Ever since, every would-be monopolist in America has been largely free to concentrate power at will, right up to complete control over an entire market. The only requirement was the ability to claim that lower prices would result. And so it was proved again the other day: Amazon promised the American consumer a few pennies in savings, and the DOJ, in the name of the people, signed away some of our most fundamental liberties.

Getting ourselves out of this mess will require two minor revolutions, one intellectual and one political.

First, the time has come for America’s antitrust “experts” to face up to the fact that the original and primary purpose of these laws was not to serve the consumer by promoting “efficiency,” but to protect the liberties of the American citizen through the safe distribution of power.

Second, those citizens directly affected–every American writer, editor, publisher, and reader–must decide where they stand. Those who prefer to work in a system where a single private boss micromanages the book business are free to do nothing. But those who believe it best to organize this vital activity in an open and transparent market have a duty to act now.

Sure, Amazon will retaliate. But even this Goliath shall fall, once enough little people stand up for the same open markets and liberties that served us so well for our first 200 years.

Six Questions for Thomas Frank

Photograph by Jane Magellanic

Thomas Frank’s Pity the Billionaire: The Hard Times Swindle and the Unlikely Comeback of the Right is the first full exploration of the rise of a new kind of false populism in the aftermath of our nation’s financial crisis. Like Frank’s best-selling What’s the Matter with Kansas and his Easy Chair columns for Harper’s Magazine, Pity the Billionaire grounds lively first-hand reporting with deep historical insight. Harper’s put six questions to Frank about his writing and the book:

1. Pity the Billionaire chronicles the revival of economic conservatism in the wake of the financial collapse. You term the means of this rise the “hard-times swindle”—the confounding story of a disaster caused by the freest of free-market capitalism, and the subsequent rise of a protest movement clamoring for more. How did Republicans channel the Tea Party’s outrage about economic issues into political power? Which is to say: Why did the swindle work?

First of all, it worked by muddling the story of the housing bubble and the economic collapse, shifting the blame from the real culprits—the much-deregulated financial industry—to those greedy neighbors of yours, buying too much house; or to the liberal state, which according to myth forced banks to hand out bad loans to poor people; or to society generally for tolerating debt at every level.

Secondly, the movement succeeded by capturing completely the one part of the story that was very clear: the bank bailouts, which instantly eclipsed the financial crisis proper when they happened and which immediately got people out of their armchairs sputtering with rage. The bailouts were not confusing. They were very clearly the deed of the federal government, apparently being operated by cronies of Wall Street. It was a spectacle of almost unbelievable corruption, the kind of thing that crushes the faith of a nation. What the public craved at that moment was a form of idealism that would allow us to scream a convincing “no” at the whole thing, and the free-market people—spotting the opportunity like any good entrepreneur—immediately stepped in and delivered exactly such an idealism. (Because, in a pure free-market system, they said, government would never rescue or bail out anyone. The market would decide who prospered and who failed.)

And thus, in miniature, was the complete failure of our great financial free-market experiment transformed into a protest movement demanding that we embrace the free-market system.

2. You vividly evoke the frothy “good versus evil” apocalyptic mania of Tea Party rallies throughout the book—I particularly liked your description of a March 2010 event that featured Jon Voight praying for our legislators’ souls. Did you find anything at those rallies that you didn’t necessarily expect to find? What most surprised you about the tea people?

They were a lot nicer than I expected them to be. The rhetoric you hear from them—all the boastful talk about guns and the outrageous protest signs they love to wave—is all so sanguinary and so apocalyptic that you expect them to be personally a little bit menacing. But they aren’t—quite the opposite: they’re friendly and polite. (At least, that was the case in my experience.) It’s as though they regard what’s being said from the podium and on the placards as a form of entertainment. Even the people selling the boastful or threatening Tea Party trinkets—and there are a lot of these—are just doing their job, getting through the day with a smile.

3. At one point, you describe a 2009 Labor Day rally in West Virginia, where thousands applauded the CEO of Massey Energy for his denunciation of government meddling. Eight months later, twenty-nine people died in a tragic explosion at a Massey coal mine, the direct result of the company’s egregious flouting of safety standards. This was only the most vivid example in Pity the Billionaire of a uniquely American paradox, in which working-class people make political decisions that seem to be in direct opposition to their own interests. What drives you to write about this dynamic?

I am drawn to moments of paradox and irony. From my first book about the counterculture’s weird symbiosis with Madison Avenue right down to that rally in West Virginia, this is what I am about. But if you asked me why this is so (and I guess you are asking me), I would have to answer that it’s because we live in paradoxical and ironic times. The social contract of the prosperous and roughly democratic America I was born into has been coming apart for decades, but not for any straightforward reason like “it didn’t work.” It’s coming apart because certain people want it to come apart; because they stand to gain if it comes apart; and yet for them to pull it apart they have to have our consent. And that spells I-R-O-N-Y.

4. In your work, you’ve highlighted politicians’ unending praise song for small businesses, whose proprietors are cast as America’s ultimate job creators—noble, unsung heroes under dire threat from government intervention. How does this fit in with the hard-times swindle?

Small business, it occurred to me, was the real cradle of the Tea Party movement; that’s who these protesters were, that’s how they identified themselves. And small business carries with it a form of populism—I call it “market populism”—that seems on the surface to be every bit as attractive as your traditional workerist populism. Like the original, it pits hard-working average people against parasitic elites (who supposedly get their way via some kind of conspiracy of the educated or via government connections). It imagines that markets are a naturally occurring form of democracy, in which the job-creating entrepreneur is equivalent to the individual citizen, and the countless small enterprises and family-run stores that populate our main streets are the great physical expression of who we are as a nation.

This can be a very attractive worldview in times like ours, especially given the almost complete absence (on the national level, anyway) of a traditional Thirties-style workerist populism. However, the practical effect of the free-market idealism of small-business is to bolster the power of big business. That’s the real beneficiary of small-business’s long war on organized labor and its endless campaigns to slash “red tape” and get government off our backs.

5. Many commentators have drawn comparisons between the Tea Party and union activism in Wisconsin, which you’ve identified in your 2011 Easy Chair columns as the true successor to the working-class populism of the 1930s. Having reported first-hand on both of these phenomena, to what extent do you think the comparisons are accurate? What about comparisons between the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street?

Well, they’re both a response to the epic cronyism between Wall Street and Washington, and they’re both fond of those Guy Fawkes masks. When I was in Wisconsin reporting on the anti–Scott Walker protests, I also heard very Tea Partyish calls to bring America back to its roots, a familiar phrase by which the protesters meant something very different than what the Tea Party means: a social arrangement by which working people lived middle-class lives. Most importantly, though, they share a very general critique of the government–industry nexus that is similar to the one I described in The Wrecking Crew. With the tea people, however, that vision is always turned inside out. Instead of industry capturing government, it’s always the opposite: government treading industry under its iron heel.

6. Since the crash, economic issues have remained at the forefront of the national conversation. On one hand we’re seeing momentum around new taxes on the wealthy, like the “Paying a Fair Share Act” proposed in Congress last month, while in the Republican primary South Carolina voters seemed to respond to Newt Gingrich’s criticisms of Romney-style venture capitalism. What can we expect from the discussion around economic policy this election year?

From the Republican politicians, I think, we will hear the message they’ve been sharpening for the past three years: that free markets are the beau ideal of human civilization; that they are the incarnation of liberty itself, the dream of the Founding Fathers, and the great guarantee against corruption and tyranny. But more importantly, we will hear all this stuff spoken with a distinctly populist edge to it. Markets let average people choose for themselves; “elites” who think they know better than everyone else (“What a snob!”) want to control and limit your market freedom. Up till now, we’ve heard this mainly from Gingrich, Rick Santorum, and Ron Paul, but Mitt Romney will have to learn to do it too if he wants to be competitive this fall.

The Empty Stomach: Fasting to Beat Jet Lag

My species of jet lag tends to the particularly hideous. Even a (relatively) short hop to Europe can leave me with a week of lethargy and brain-fog. My trips to the Far East are too horrific to commit to print. It was therefore with pleasure that, before setting out for India last month, I learned that by skipping the in-flight fare, I might skip the jet lag as well.

The Argonne Anti–Jet-Lag diet, as the putative antidote is known, was devised in the 1980s by the late Charles Ehret, a “chronobiologist” at the Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois who discovered that our biological clocks are cued in part by when and how much we eat. After experimenting on protozoa, rats, and his eight children, Ehret recommended that the international traveler, in the several days before his flight, alternate days of feasting with days of very light eating. Come the flight, the traveler would nibble sparsely until eating a big breakfast at about 7:30 a.m. in his new time zone—no matter that it was still 1:30 a.m. in the old time zone or that the airline wasn’t serving breakfast until 10:00 a.m. His reward would be little or no jet lag.

Ehret theorized that the diet worked because the days of irregular eating gradually unmoored the body’s biological clock from its usual rhythms, while the big breakfast and subsequent meals re-anchored the clock in the new time zone. In a 2002 study published in the journal Military Medicine, National Guardsmen who followed the diet were found to be 7.5 times less likely than a control group to suffer jet lag after flying from the United States to Korea. On their return, they were 16.2 times less likely to lag. (The difference between the two flights has not been explained, although, as the authors noted, jet lag is more common flying east than flying west.)

The Army, Navy, CIA, Canadian National Swim Team, and Mormon Tabernacle Choir have all used the diet. So too an aged Ronald Reagan, who I had previously assumed looked so fresh on arrival in Bangkok or Bitburg because he was unburdened by the cares of his office. To my taste, however, the diet had two big drawbacks. For one, Ehret prescribed a fairly narrow range of foods. (For feast-day lunches: “Suitable meals include steak, eggs, hamburgers, high-protein cereals, green beans.” For dinners: “spaghetti and other pastas (but no meatballs), crepes (but no meat filling), potatoes, other starchy vegetables.”) For another, it is devilishly hard to eat very little for whole days—harder than eating nothing—because the taste of food stimulates the desire for more food. Enduring this sort of unpleasantness for days before emplaning in order to avoid unpleasantness for days after deplaning seemed the proverbial cutting off of the nose to vex the face.

Fortunately, in the past few years a team from Harvard and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston has concocted a more elegant remedy: the anti–jet lag fast. The international traveler, they counsel, can avoid jet lag by simply not eating for twelve to sixteen hours before breakfast time in the new time zone—at which point, as in Ehret’s diet, he should break his fast. Since most of us go twelve to sixteen hours between dinner and breakfast anyway, the abstention is a small hardship.

According to the Harvard team, the fast works because our bodies have, in addition to our circadian clock, a second clock that might be thought of as a food clock or, perhaps better, a master clock. When food is scarce, this master clock suspends the circadian clock and commands the body to sleep much less than normally. Only after the body starts eating again does the master clock switch the circadian clock back on.

The master clock probably evolved because when our prehistoric forebears were starving, they would have been tempted in their weakness to sleep rather than forage for the food they needed to survive. Today, when a traveler suspends his circadian clock before flying from Los Angeles to London, and then reactivates it upon breaking the fast, the clock doesn’t know that it should still be on Pacific Time. It knows only that the breakfast and the daylight declare morning in Mayfair, and it resets the body’s rhythms accordingly.

As yet, there have been no human trials to prove or deny the efficacy of the Harvardian fast, but the body of anecdotal evidence in its favor is large. I decided to employ my family in adding to the largesse.

From takeoff in Denver to touchdown in Delhi took twenty-four hours. My wife and I ate our last food on the Chicago–Frankfurt leg and skipped the swill thereafter. We arrived in Delhi at two in the morning, slept, and arose at eight to a glorious repast of dosas and samosas. To our pleasant surprise, we had more than enough vitality throughout the day to trade refreshing elbows with the patrons of the Delhi Metro. Nor on subsequent days did we feel the slightest hint of jet lag.

Our son fared less well. Children, to every traveling parent’s dismay, rarely suffer jet lag to the degree of their betters. (The eighteenth round of hide-and-seek on the first night in Venice is as good a reason as any for leaving your progeny with the dogsitter.) So we had seen no need to fast our nine-year-old. We were also not opposed to having a control group for our experiment. And what a control it was. On the first four or five afternoons in India, our son collapsed in an insensate heap, utterly unstirred by his elixir of choice, mango lassi.

On the return home, all three of us fasted. This time the young master was time’s master, my wife again its mistress. They awoke full of vim on the morning after our journey. Not so I. In our last few days in Mumbai, I had contracted shingles, and on reentry I was as sluggish as I would have been, I suspect, had I not fasted at all. But of course whether the shingles alone caused my fatigue or whether my fast had failed me, too, is a mystery beyond answer.

The same air of mystery hangs over the question of whether my family’s successes against jet lag were the result of fasting. Perhaps we merely enjoyed a placebo effect. Perhaps we benefited from some heretofore undiscovered preventive—say, eating a kiwi or a curry precisely 62 hours before takeoff. I do not know. I know only that the next time a steward asks me, “Chicken stroganoff or bean-curd ziti?” I will reply, “I think a sparkling water will do me just fine.”

Correction

A line in the March 2012 Harper’s Index incorrectly stated that 72 percent of political ad spending during the 2010 election cycle would have been prohibited before the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision. In fact, 72 percent of outside political ad spending in the 2010 cycle would have been prohibited before Citizens United and a 2007 decision, Federal Election Commission v. Wisconsin Right to Life, Inc. Although the item was sourced to the Center for Responsive Politics, the mistake was entirely ours. We regret the error.

Web Content: The February 2012 Issue

Dear Readers,

The February 2012 issue of Harper’s Magazine is with subscribers, for whom it is also available online, and it will be on newsstands for another few weeks yet. We’ve posted a number of pieces related to features in the issue since it came out. A summary is below, along with a few web links related to the issue.

Thomas Frank’s Easy Chair column, “Act of Contrition” (p. 6) focuses on Jack Abramoff and the genre of the Washington D.C. contrition memoir. Frank is a veteran Abramoff-watcher, having written about the disgraced lobbyist in his 2008 book, The Wrecking Crew, which was excerpted in Harper’s with the pithy subtitle “How a gang of right-wing con men destroyed Washington and made a killing.” Harper’s Magazine contributing editor Scott Horton has also written extensively on Abramoff, most recently in “Abramoff 2.0.” We recommend, too, that subscribers surf to “We Know Jack,” a Reading from the June 2006 issue consisting of excerpts from letters written in support of Abramoff prior to his sentencing for fraud. Samples:

His first and foremost consideration was protecting America from its enemies. Only later did he cash in on the contacts he made from his idealistic endeavors.

Jack made every effort possible to secure funding for a film entitled The Day the Clown Cried, a movie about the importance of taking care of children, set in a WWII concentration camp.

Statistics from the current Harper’s Index (p. 11) are tweeted throughout the month using the hashtag #HarpersIndex. Follow @harpers to see them as they go out.

In this month’s Readings section (p. 13), Andrew Bacevich asks what has happened to the ideal Henry Luce wrote of in his Life Magazine essay “The American Century,” which you can find here. We have also made available online “What Happened in Vegas,” a series of frustrated exchanges between the fact checker and author of a literary non-fiction feature for The Believer.

Barry C. Lynn’s “Killing the Competition” (p. 27) is excerpted on Harpers.org. Lynn also wrote a blog post on President Obama’s failure to tackle monopolies in America, while a past feature, “Breaking the Chain: The antitrust case against Wal-Mart,” is available for free online.

To his feature on the emergence of democracy in a Peruvian prison, “All Politics Is Local” (p. 35), Daniel Alarcón has added a supplementary online narrative, “Rigoberto,” about a prisoner he encountered at another jail in Lima. We also suggest that Spanish-speaking readers check out Alarcon’s new project, Radio Ambulante, a storytelling podcast.

Nathan Schneider’s feature on the genesis of Occupy Wall Street, “Some Assembly Required” (p. 45), followed two blog posts by the author for Harpers.org. The first was a primer on the General Assembly, the primary decision-making forum for Occupations nation-wide; the second was a critique of the claim that occupations should be protected as free speech under the law. After the article was published, Schneider added a third post, “Planet Occupy,” in which he imagined the society the Occupy movement has been working toward. Also worth checking out is the website of Bob Arihood, whom Schneider mentions in his feature as having taken photographs at one of the first Occupy Wall Street planning meetings. The specific photo to which Schneider refers is here.

And last, the issue’s concluding Findings section (p. 80), where you will learn, among other necessary facts, that babies as young as eight enjoy seeing bad puppets punished. So watch yourselves, puppets.

Obama’s Big Shtick

Obama chose Osawatomie because it was there that Theodore Roosevelt took his first step toward abandoning the Republican Party to run as a Progressive, supposedly to battle the powers that had captured the G.O.P. and Washington. Obama, eager to portray himself as a fighter for today’s middle class, carefully draped Roosevelt’s mantle over his own shoulders. Roosevelt, he said, had “busted up monopolies, forcing those companies to compete.” Then, striking his own brave stance against Goliath, Obama boomed, “Today, they still must.”

The problem with Obama’s story is that Roosevelt’s reputation as a trustbuster is largely based on myth. As one genuinely progressive Republican leader of that era, Senator Robert La Follette (Wis.), wrote in 1913, Roosevelt’s anti-monopoly rhetoric “went just far enough to give color to the claim that he was upholding the law.” But when it came time to act, Roosevelt ran in the opposite direction, and for all intents “opened the floodgates for trust organization” in America. “Upon Theodore Roosevelt more than any other man,” La Follette wrote, “must rest the responsibility for the gravest problem which ever menaced the industrial freedom of the American people.”

Which brings us to a question: Is President Obama bad at history, or is he consciously following Roosevelt’s MO of talking tough, then carrying the rich man’s bags? Unlike in 2008, when for a few glorious months candidate Obama seemed truly to want to serve as the people’s man in Washington, we now have the record of three years in office. So far, it ain’t the stuff of glory.

Obama’s government can boast of blocking AT&T’s takeover of T-Mobile, but that deal was easy to queer, since companies at least as powerful as AT&T opposed the move. Meanwhile, his administration has approved mergers of banks, pharmaceutical companies, and airlines, as well as the marriages of Comcast and NBC, and of Live Nation and Ticketmaster. Perhaps most damning is the administration’s servile retreat from its promise to stand up for America’s farmers, such as the poultry growers I write about in “Killing the Competition.” Here we have American citizens in a condition of near complete economic enslavement to arbitrary power. Here also we have a realm where the administration had given the American people reason to believe.

In 2010, the Department of Agriculture and Department of Justice jointly organized five public hearings on monopoly in agriculture. The hearings took place in Iowa, Alabama, Colorado, Wisconsin, and Washington. Among those in attendance were Attorney General Eric Holder and Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack. The highlights included a dramatic offer made by the head of Justice’s antitrust division, Christine Varney, to protect Alabama poultry farmer Garry Staples from retaliation, if only he’d speak on the record. For a brief moment, it seemed as though sober public servants were working for the American citizen.

The American citizenry can now weigh the harvest of that hope: a single insignificant change in the rules governing poultry tournaments¹1. Wherein buyers pay more per piece to those who produce the most, pitting poultry farmers against each other while maximizing the return to capital.—a practice that shouldn’t have existed among a free people in the first place. Nothing more is on the way. Last July, Christine Varney traded the public’s trust for a hefty payday at the New York law firm Cravath, Swaine & Moore, which is renowned for defending monopolists. And two weeks ago, the last dedicated agricultural reformer in the administration, Dudley Butler, jumped from the hay cart.

In Osawatomie, President Obama said that the American people today face the same “choice” they did a century ago. Indeed. But when we are finally ready to fight that fight, we’d do better to turn for guidance to the man who beat Theodore Roosevelt in 1912: Woodrow Wilson. “If there are men in this country big enough to own the government of the United States, they are going to own it,” Wilson said. “What we have to determine now is whether we are big enough, whether we are men enough, whether we are free enough, to take possession again of the government which is our own.”

I, for one, have complete faith that the American people will prevail. But we will do so only when we use our voices and votes to empower leaders with the guts to wield big sticks along with the shtick.

Planet Occupy

I recently learned about a revolutionist pamphlet published last year in Spain called La Carta de los Comunes. It begins with an intriguing conceit. Set in 2033 in a magical-realist Madrid, it tells of a population whose bodies became physically hunched over in submission to a wealthy few. At last, with their livelihoods nearly eviscerated, the people rise up and take over their city. They resurrect the medieval notion of the commons, creating a domain of shared resources apart from the market and bureaucratic oversight. They learn to stand upright again. The pamphlet then presents a Magna Carta for their new society.

I can’t resist applying a similar futurism to Occupy Wall Street, the phenomenon whose origins I describe in the February 2012 issue of Harper’s. Even the most hopeful young occupiers are starting to realize that their revolutionary dreams might take longer to achieve than a semester’s leave from school—and justly so. As I noticed during the planning process, and have continued to see in the movement thus far, even those most centrally involved are constantly discovering for themselves where it is leading.

The question of what Occupy Wall Street is really about has been notoriously thorny from the outset. The movement’s attempts to craft agreed-upon “demands” have generally fallen flat. Nevertheless, a set of quite interesting but rarely discussed texts have withstood the consensus-building process at local general assemblies. Reading them closely, and with an eye to the praxis in the occupations themselves, I see no quick-and-easy legislative, executive, or judicial patches for the problems the movement means to confront. I came to think, instead, that the movement’s lasting contribution could be something substantially more ambitious: a wholesale rethinking of political life, more akin to the promulgation of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen in revolutionary France than, say, the introduction of a financial-transaction tax or the revocation of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision in the United States. (Unlike the Declaration of the Rights of Man, mind you, the Occupy documents rarely refer to property, law, or patriotic sentiment. They don’t even mention borders.)

It isn’t crazy to think the time has come to go back to the drawing board, politically. The constitutions of most Western nation-states were dreamed up during the late Enlightenment, long before anyone could foresee such realities as globalized mega-corporations profiting from chronic personal and national debt, Internet companies possessing more private information than the average diary, and undeclared wars being fought by drone aircraft—which have all contributed to what Occupy Wall Street describes as a “feeling of mass injustice” in its Declaration of the Occupation of New York City, approved on September 29 and now available as an attractive pamphlet. Our familiar, Lockean governments have come to seem inept, powerless to oppose the incorporeal profit machines that can, as the declaration adds, “achieve the same rights as people, with none of the culpability or responsibility.” The Declaration of the Occupation is addressed not to governments—no hope there—but rather “to the people of the world,” urging communities everywhere to “assert your power.”

“We are creating an exemplar society,” states Occupy Boston’s Declaration of Occupation. That being the case, let’s attempt some Occupy sci-fi: What would the world look like if the Occupy revolution were carried through to completion?

“No one’s human needs go unmet,” continues the Boston declaration. Planet Occupy, like last fall’s occupations, provides food and shelter for everyone, no questions asked. It also ensures health care, mutual education, childcare, legal representation, and a large, meticulously catalogued library. Sounds like a good social democracy—except that, in the words of Occupy Wall Street’s Principles of Solidarity, the basic unit of political life is not the ballot box but “autonomous political beings engaging in direct and transparent participatory democracy.” Though they might be wired to the teeth, the political beings of Planet Occupy carry out their democracy face to face, in well-coordinated small groups that operate by consensus. It’s “participatory as opposed to partisan,” adds the Statement of Autonomy, suggesting that the aim on Planet Occupy is for all voices to be heard, rather than for one party to prevail over others. Those with “inherent privilege” defer whenever possible to others. The consolidation of power is discouraged, and resisted when necessary. Policing troublemakers becomes the job not of cops, but of assertive, well-trained listeners.

The movement’s documents contain fewer hints about Planet Occupy’s economy. The Principles of Solidarity calls for “redefining how labor is valued,” which may look something like the worker-owned cooperatives currently being developed at the Freedom Plaza occupation in Washington, D.C. Broadly speaking, human needs prevail over claims on profit. Companies are chartered for the public good, not private gain. Participatory democracy prevails in workplaces, neighborhoods, and other productive groupings. Many aspects of the economy—food, especially—remain local. This is necessary partly in order to preserve and sustain the natural environment. Everyone on Planet Occupy knows, after all, that if they don’t protect the planet, there will be nothing left to occupy.

Even with its inhabitants’ passion for local autonomy, though, Planet Occupy is a globalized place. People and their ideas travel freely, creating new opportunities and partnerships wherever they go. Assemblies share their plans and innovations over Interoccupy. (The movement’s conference-call network will have supplanted the original Internet, which was overrun by corporate advertising.) Following the urge in the Principles for “the broad application of open source,” all ideas are common property, and these collective resources are, according to the Statement of Autonomy, valued more highly than money—if money still exists at all. SOPA-style censorship in the name of ownership is not okay.

Also not okay is using violence to resolve conflicts. Almost every Occupy document makes some statement to this effect. Occupy Boston’s Memorandum of Solidarity with Indigenous Peoples envisions “a new era of peace and cooperation that will work for everyone.” When conflict occurs, as is inevitable, people resist injustice through “non-violent civil disobedience and building solidarity based on mutual respect, acceptance, and love,” in accordance with the Principles. Every such struggle is both local and global.

Is this anarchist utopia realistic, or even desirable? It’s at least a little out there. Perhaps a lot out there. But the Declaration of the Rights of Man, drafted while Louis XVI still had his head, wasn’t easy to comprehend in its time. The circumstances of our world exceed the politics we’re used to imagining for it, and the politics that are really necessary might therefore seem impossible. “We have come to Wall Street as refugees from this native dreamland, seeking asylum in the actual,” explains “Communiqué 1,” an article in the movement journal Tidal. “We seek to rediscover and reclaim the world.”

Into the Harper’s Archive: On Monopolies

Harper’s has been reporting on monopoly capitalism almost since the magazine’s founding in 1850, criticizing the system whenever it appeared to be concentrating too much power in the hands of a greedy few, and sometimes spurring change. Our first significant piece on the subject was a two-part essay by Richard T. Ely on railway trusts, which ran in 1886. (Subscribers can read part one here, and part two here.) “I propose to show in these articles,” Ely wrote, “that our abominable no-system of railways has brought the American people to a condition of one-sided dependence upon corporations, which too often renders our nominal freedom illusory.” The following year, Congress passed the Interstate Commerce Act, which created the Interstate Commerce Commission and placed it in charge of railway regulation, in turn paving the way for the landmark Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890.

More famously, our sister periodical, Harper’s Weekly, published a multi-part series by Louis D. Brandeis shortly before the First World War on the subject of monopoly capitalism. The articles, based on revelations from the congressional Pujo Committee, were collected as Other People’s Money and How the Bankers Use It, which is available at the website of the Louis D. Brandeis School of Law at Louisville University. As the school notes, Other People’s Money remains in print nearly a hundred years after it was first published. Brandeis’s biographer, Melvin Urofsky, suggested why this is so in an op-ed for the New York Times, linking the conditions about which Brandeis was writing to the financial system of 2007:

Our current crisis, after all, was in part fueled by bankers making big gambles with other people’s cash…. This was exactly the kind of behavior that Brandeis despised…. [H]e saw the bankers of his time dodging failure by manipulating the marketplace at the expense of smaller entrepreneurs and consumers.

Brandeis, who was Woodrow Wilson’s economic adviser when the book was published, was instrumental in Wilson’s antimonopoly efforts, notably the Clayton Antitrust Act of 1914, an overdue update to Sherman.

Urofsky notes that Brandeis’s Harper’s work became relevant again during the Great Depression, when Other People’s Money was reissued at a low price. “Many of those who came to Washington to work on Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal read it,” he writes. “The New Deal laws, particularly the Glass–Steagall and the Securities Exchange Acts, imposed long overdue regulation of the banking system, required the separation of banking from stock brokerage, and established the Securities and Exchange Commission to regulate the stock markets.”

The monthly edition of Harper’s continued to publish anti-monopoly pieces through the Depression and afterward: Saul Nelson’s deconstruction of the term monopoly, in 1938; “How Big Is Too Big?” by renowned management theorist Peter Drucker, in 1950; Milton Viorst’s “Gentlemen Prefer Monopoly: The impotence of the antitrust laws” in 1972; and “Busting the Media Trusts,” by Kevin P. Phillips, in 1977. And in advance of the Justice Department’s 1999 antitrust suit against Microsoft, we tweaked Bill Gates’s beard specs with “Selling Windows to the World,” a Reading tracing a UCLA undergraduate’s attempts to buy a PC with an operating system other than Microsoft Windows.

“Killing the Competition” follows from this concern with the tech economy, scrutinizing Apple, Amazon, and other digital titans. In the past decade we’ve published three other pieces by Lynn as well, one of them, on the antitrust case against Wal-Mart, available for free here. “I was able to write these pieces,” Lynn told us, “only because Harper’s exists.”