Naming the Dead at Ground Zero

A profile of Rhonda Roby, a forensic scientist who has identified the bodies of victims of 9/11, victims of serial killer John Wayne Gacy, Vietnam and Korean War MIAs, bodies of the Romanov family, victims buried in Chilean mass graves, and more:

“Standing there in the middle of the smoking apocalypse of the Twin Towers, she pushed aside emotion and forced the scientist part of her brain to click. ‘I kept thinking, “These people are walking on my crime scene.”‘ She checks herself. ‘”Well, not my crime scene, but the crime scene. Of course, I wanted to identify as many remains as possible.”

“While firemen and policemen all around her desperately searched for signs of life, Roby was doing math. At the time, she was the forensic manager for Applied Biosystems, a private biotech company. She stepped into the scene at 9/11 as one of the world’s leading experts in mitochondrial DNA, with hard-core experience identifying victims of mass disasters from tiny fragments of bone. There were thousands of dead. It would be necessary to sequence about 1,000 bases of DNA information on each sample of human remains, the painstaking process required to order the building blocks of a person’s unique DNA.

“In the end, Roby led a team that processed 21,000 DNA samples dug from the rubble of the World Trade Center. She will go down in history as one of the scientists who rushed to Ground Zero, including superstar biologist Craig Venter, famous for his work deciphering the human genetic code. Venter, instrumental in tapping her expertise for 9/11, became a friend through the experience.”

Source: D Magazine
Published: Oct 24, 2012
Length: 18 minutes (4,634 words)

Monopoly Is Theft

Monopoly has become “the world’s best-selling proprietary board game,” but the original game allowed players to cooperate so that everyone could prosper:

“With us in Jarrell’s cottage was Mike Curtis, an Ardenite who twenty years earlier had played a round of Magie’s original 1906 Landlord’s Game (one of his opponents, as it happened, was Patrice McFarland). The Georgist rules by which Curtis had played were known as the Single Tax set, and they went beyond having players simply pay rent into Magie’s ‘Public Treasury.’ They also aimed to teach the shared ownership of public goods. Under Single Tax rules, when the amount in the treasury reached fifty dollars, the player who owned the lighting utility was forced to sell it, and thereafter the utility cost no money to land on, as it was now publicly owned. This process repeated itself with the Slambang Trolley, then with the railroads, then with the Go to Jail space, which became a public college that, instead of sending players to jail, provided extra wages at the end of the game. After that, each fifty-dollar deposit in the treasury raised players’ wages by ten dollars. A ‘win’ in Single Tax, which Magie later dubbed Prosperity Game, occurred when the player with the least amount of money had doubled his original capital. ‘The Landlord’s Game,’ said Magie, ‘shows why our national housekeeping has gone wrong and Prosperity Game shows how to start it right and keep it going right.’ Curtis admitted that he didn’t think much of the game, pronouncing it ‘kind of boring after a while.'”

Published: Oct 19, 2012
Length: 24 minutes (6,234 words)

Can Andrea Rossi’s Infinite-Energy Black Box Power The World—Or Just Scam It?

An Italian inventor may have created a machine that can generate so much cheap energy, it would put oil companies out of business. Or it all may be a spectacular scam:

“On the last day of the conference, Dennis Bushnell, chief scientist at Langley Research Center, summed up the state of LENR research. Guys like Rossi play a crucial role, for better or for worse. ‘This will go directly from the garage, the Edisonian experiments, to market, bypassing the science and the rigorous engineering research,’ Bushnell said. ‘And there are major investors ready to move on this—an amazing number—given a credible third-party seal of approval. I mean, this can move fast. If we ever get a credible assessment in the kilowatt range’—one kilowatt will power ten 100-watt lightbulbs—’the world changes overnight.’ Bushnell paused and took a sip of water. ‘We have so screwed up this planet,’ he said, raising his voice. ‘This is one of the few things I know of that’s capable for atoning for our sins.’

“To my astonishment, after three days of asking every cold-fusion researcher in the house, I couldn’t find a single person willing to call Rossi a con man. The consensus was that he had something, even if he didn’t understand why it worked or how to control it. The more I learned, the more confused I became. Could Rossi actually have something real? The only way to know for sure was to go to Italy.”

Source: Popular Science
Published: Oct 23, 2012
Length: 24 minutes (6,175 words)

When A Daughter Dies

A physician relates his experience of watching his daughter die of cancer:

“A Greek aphorism warns, ‘Call no man happy until he is dead.’ A calamity that I hoped/presumed never would occur now seems likely – I am going to outlive one of my children. I am very unhappy, and my wife asks if we will ever be happy again.”

Source: Freakonomics
Published: Oct 16, 2012
Length: 8 minutes (2,140 words)

State of the Species

A brief history of Homo sapiens—and a prognosis for our survival:

“Microorganisms have changed the face of the earth, crumbling stone and even giving rise to the oxygen we breathe. Compared to this power and diversity, Margulis liked to tell me, pandas and polar bears were biological epiphenomena—interesting and fun, perhaps, but not actually significant.

“Does that apply to human beings, too? I once asked her, feeling like someone whining to Copernicus about why he couldn’t move the earth a little closer to the center of the universe. Aren’t we specialat all?

“This was just chitchat on the street, so I didn’t write anything down. But as I recall it, she answered that Homo sapiens actually might be interesting—for a mammal, anyway. For one thing, she said, we’re unusually successful.

“Seeing my face brighten, she added: Of course, the fate of every successful species is to wipe itself out.”

Source: Orion Magazine
Published: Oct 25, 2012
Length: 32 minutes (8,232 words)

Cuba’s New Now

A reporter spends a winter in Cuba and takes a look at life in a post-Fidel era, which is changing gradually for some, but not fast enough for others who are still looking to escape to the U.S.:

“‘Viva Cuba Libre,’ Eduardo muttered, mimicking a revolutionary exhortation we’d seen emblazoned high on an outdoor wall. Long live free Cuba. ‘Free from both of them,’ he said. ‘That’s when there might be real change.’

“If there is in fact a Cuba under serious transformation—and you can find Cubans all over the country engaging now in their own versions of this same debate—Eduardo is a crucial component of it, although not for the reasons you might think. “Dissident” is the right label for a subset of politically vocal Cubans, notably the bloggers whose critical online missives have gained big followings outside the country, but Eduardo is no sort of dissident. He’s not fleeing persecution by the state. He’s just young, energetic, and frustrated, a description that applies to a great many of his countrymen. Ever since he was a teenager in high school, Eduardo told me, it had been evident to him that adulthood in revolutionary Cuba offered exactly nothing by way of personal advancement and material comfort to anybody except the peces gordos. The big fish. (Well, literally translated, the fat fish—the tap-on-the-shoulder parties.) Nothing works here, Eduardo would cry, pounding the steering wheel of whatever car he’d hustled on loan for the day: The economic model is broken, state employees survive on their tiny salaries only by stealing from the jobsite, the national news outlets are an embarrassment of self-censored boosterism, the government makes people crazy by circulating two national currencies at once.

“‘I love my country,’ Eduardo kept saying. ‘But there is no future for me here.'”

Published: Oct 25, 2012
Length: 27 minutes (6,772 words)

The Island Where People Forget to Die

Researchers are studying the residents of the island of Ikaria to figure out why so many of them live well into their 90s and beyond:

“Following the report by Pes and Poulain, Dr. Christina Chrysohoou, a cardiologist at the University of Athens School of Medicine, teamed up with half a dozen scientists to organize the Ikaria Study, which includes a survey of the diet of 673 Ikarians. She found that her subjects consumed about six times as many beans a day as Americans, ate fish twice a week and meat five times a month, drank on average two to three cups of coffee a day and took in about a quarter as much refined sugar — the elderly did not like soda. She also discovered they were consuming high levels of olive oil along with two to four glasses of wine a day.

“Chrysohoou also suspected that Ikarians’ sleep and sex habits might have something to do with their long life. She cited a 2008 paper by the University of Athens Medical School and the Harvard School of Public Health that studied more than 23,000 Greek adults. The researchers followed subjects for an average of six years, measuring their diets, physical activity and how much they napped. They found that occasional napping was associated with a 12 percent reduction in the risk of coronary heart disease, but that regular napping — at least three days weekly — was associated with a 37 percent reduction. She also pointed out a preliminary study of Ikarian men between 65 and 100 that included the fact that 80 percent of them claimed to have sex regularly, and a quarter of that self-reported group said they were doing so with ‘good duration’ and ‘achievement.'”

Published: Oct 24, 2012
Length: 21 minutes (5,339 words)

The Truck Stop Killer

The writer recalls her past life, without family and hitching rides at truck stops—and a time in which she may have crossed paths with a serial killer:

“I had a vision of Lisa Pennal as a truck-stop Kali roaming the back lots in her denim skirt and fuzzy slippers with an ozone hole for a halo. She would be easy to dismiss. Rhoades intentionally chose women who lacked credibility. Sometimes, as with Shana Holts, the girl who had escaped in the brewery, the sense of not being credible was internalized. Lee told me that the final lines of Holts’s police statement read, ‘I don’t see any good in filing charges. It’s just going to be my word against his. If there was any evidence, I would file. I would file charges and sue him.’

“It took me a second to understand those last sentences. What evidence was she lacking? She was found running naked, screaming down a street in Houston with DNA all over her body, her head and pubic hair shaved, still with his chain around her neck. How could she lack evidence? But I thought about what she’d said—’It would just be my word against his,’ which was clearly followed by the unvoiced thought: And who is going to believe me? I could easily imagine my own teenage voice whispering those same words.”

Source: GQ
Published: Oct 24, 2012
Length: 32 minutes (8,063 words)

His Mother’s Wish

[Fiction] A son reluctantly helps his mother die, and moves on with his life:

“When Chup Vakil came home from his interview, he didn’t expect his mother to ask him to help her die. As he contemplated his mother’s request, the day flashed through his mind: pale grey cubicles, women clerks, black ties matching thick mustaches, firm doors—an inauspicious, solid black—cold air from the AC raising the hair on his arms, and a large street sign reading Golconda Legal Associates of Radhapur in Hindi.

“‘Why should we hire you?’ They spoke only in English—not his mother tongue—but he managed. He had been a lawyer for nine years, recently laid off due to financial reasons but with good references and not a blemish on his record. The conference hall smelled of lilac air freshener and dark coffee. He sat alone on one side of the table in his lucky suit.”

Source: Indian Review
Published: Oct 11, 2012
Length: 22 minutes (5,736 words)

Coach: A Local Legend and a Young Man’s Search to Find Himself

A young man’s memories of quitting the football team:

“The boy remembers walking the hallway toward his office, telling himself not to give in. He sat face-to-face with Coach, Bear Bryant’s picture hanging nearby on the office wall. Are you sure you want to spend your senior year in the bleachers? Coach said. Full of teenage arrogance, the boy said he wouldn’t be attending any games. He said he had watched from the sideline for two seasons and had his fill.

“Coach, always slow to speak, leaned back in his chair and warned him. He warned him that not that season, but in a decade or so, he would come to regret his decision and that once made, it could not be undone.

“The boy laughed. A grown man, said the boy, has no business thinking of games he did or did not play in high school. Coach said all right and the boy left. He never called him ‘Coach’ again. Not because he walked away from football, but because that summer the coach married his mother.

“And the boy hated him for that.”

Published: Oct 9, 2012
Length: 12 minutes (3,001 words)