When we first meet Mark Moffett, the man at the centre of Before the Swarm, he is grinning about a botfly maggot that has died in his hand. Not in the palm of his hand, mind you, but implanted within the flesh.
The rest of the tale – the third in The Atavist’s growing stable of long-form non-fiction – proceeds along similar lines.
Nicholas Griffin narrates the life of an ant-loving scientist who self-describes as “Dr Bugs”, plays at both journalism and photography, and frequently disappears on long jungle odysseys. He loves the world’s most painful insect, but he loathes universities. Standing outside of the scientific establishment, he has been criticised for favouring mass media and compelling stories over testing hypotheses and collecting data. There is a compelling counterpoint, which Griffin notes early on, between the ants, whose societies revolve around “hierarchy and specialisation” and Moffett, who “can’t seem to stand either one”.
Griffin’s writing is wonderfully lean and evocative. When Moffett speaks, it is with tight snippets of dialogue (he introduces his parasite with “Have you met my botfly?” and greets the legendary E. O. Wilson with “Hi Ed”). When he is described, it is with tight, unadorned prose.
Then again, one gets the sense that Moffett doesn’t require much embellishment. He’s a writer’s dream protagonist: quotable, possessed of a rebellious streak, and prone to misadventure. He electrocutes himself! He gets kidnapped! He’s been bitten! There is a real risk here that the tale could descends into a list of amusing anecdotes – less a cohesive story, and more The Continuing and Wacky Adventures of Mark Moffett.
But just when Beforethe Swarm starts to veer down that direction, Griffin hits you with genuine tragedy at the midpoint. I’ll stop short of explicit spoilers but it involves the quote, “That’s a fucking krait.” It’s a turning point, and Griffin deals with it well, giving it room to breathe and ramify. It changes the feel of the earlier lists of derring-do from a Boy’s Own adventure into a tally of genuinely dangerous pursuits.
Then, in the second half, after much time with the man’s history and exploits, his ideas finally get a chance to shine. Sadly, they merely flicker. Here, arguably where it matters most, Moffett becomes a bit-player in his own story.
We learn that, riffing off E.O. Wilson, Moffett thinks that human and ant societies both follow similar rules, and develop similar features, as they get bigger. And we’re told that this is a “fresh idea” even though it feels somewhat familiar.
We’re told that Moffett advocates the idea of ant colonies as superorganisms – that is, they behave like a single being. The superlatively successful Argentine ants are the prime example: its colonies contain billions or even trillions of individuals, genetically similar and spread across entire states. But while Griffin writes about the theory’s origins a century ago, and we meet another scientist who has “written nearly 50 papers on the subject”, Moffett’s own contribution remains quite vague. Griffin says that he is “looking to move beyond simple metaphors” but then relies heavily on metaphors that liken ants to white blood cells and urban humans. The very idea of a superorganism is itself a metaphor.
The scientifically minded reader is then left with many questions. What does it actually say about ants to treat a colony as a single organism? What insights or testable predictions come of it? How has our hero actually advanced the science of superorganisms? None of these is clear. He is probably embroiled in a meaty intellectual debate, but it never truly surfaces. A fellow scientist criticises the idea of an Argentine ant supercolony for untold reasons, and Moffett is later seen attempting to dismantle the critique on untold grounds. In lieu of details, we’re left with the idea of a superorganism as nothing more than a neat framing device, rather than the dogma-shaking “controversial theory” that the standfirst promises.
We might have expected it. The first third of the story, after all, is devoted to telling us how Moffett has a predilection for evocative ideas over solid hypotheses. It’s still a sting in an otherwise great story, but ultimately it’s not a deal-breaker. While Before the Swarm fails as the story of a brave new idea, it amply succeeds as a profile of a fascinating man.
And it ends with a video of a maggot erupting from the skin of its protagonist. That helps too.
*****
Ed Yong is a British science writer who writes the award-winning blog Not Exactly Rocket Science. His work has appeared in Nature, New Scientist, the BBC, the Guardian, the Times, Wired UK, Discover, CNN, Slate, the Daily Telegraph, the Economist and more. He lives in London with his wife. He has never been impregnated by a botfly but he does rather like ants.
Planet Killers: A Spine-Tingling Look at Near Earth Objects, Mass Extinctions, and the Controversial Science of Planetary Defense, by Tad Friend, Byliner Originals, 2011. ($0.99: iTunes, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Google, Sony, Kobo)
One of the joys of borrowing a stranger’s cabin comes from the serendipity of someone else’s taste in books. Years ago, in a corner of the hills east of Lake Winnipesaukee, I picked up a Stephen King anthology. I’ve long since forgotten most of what I read there, but King’s introduction stuck in my mind. The novella, he wrote, (I paraphrase from battered memory) was not so much a literary form as a kind of writer’s banana republic, a treacherous, alien territory into which innocents pass, never to escape unscathed. How and when to turn the plot; the number of characters one can develop; the pace; the amount of exposition the piece can tolerate – all these tasks shift as the writer moves from either the expansive canvas of a full book or the utter economy short stories demand. And until you’ve actually entered into that strange country, Novella, King warned, you have no idea how twisted are its paths.
Tad Friend dares such dangers in what amounts to a non-fiction novella, Planet Killers, published in the Byliner Originals series. It tells of the threat posed by crud from space that could strike the earth, and of attempts by a few scientists and engineers to figure out how to dodge such bullets. That'’s a fine premise, certainly, and of course anything that brings together dinosaurs, great balls of fire, and wild but plausible schemes with names like “gravity tractors” has got all the elements of a riveting read.
There's a bit of a wobble right at the start, though, as Friend recalls a tequila-fueled milliennial New Year’s Eve spent waiting for sunrise on the Yucatan Peninsula before leaping, abruptly, to the scene 65 million years ago, when it was a skosh more exciting in those parts, what with the dinosaur-destoying asteroid splashing down just offshore. From that rather jolting beginning, we settle into a story built on two pillars: a character sketch of the always enjoyable Rusty Schweikart, the Apollo astronaut, as Friend reports, most likely to show up at a New Age conference; and a loose narrative of a two day meeting by a NASA advisory committee debating strategies for “planetary defense” – basically how to avoid getting whacked by a major earth-crossing asteroid in the future.
Those two threads unreel rather calmly, given that our spines are supposed to be tingled. Schweickart and his co-conspirators fear that most decisions makers (and everyone else) are simply unaware of the existential threat posed by a major impact, and of the probabilities involved. Friend detours briefly into a natural history of asteroids and impacts. We get hints of the science involved – a mention of complex orbits; brief discussions of the technologies that might deflect really big rocks – that gravity tractor, for one, a spaceship that comes to rest close enough to a dangerous rock long enough before any predicted collision to permit the probe’s gravity to nudge the object onto a safe trajectory. In his best set piece, Friend manages to get inside his hero’s head– capturing Schweickart’s evolution from fighter pilot to save-the-earth crusader, in a process that began on his untethered space walk, when he suddenly felt the fragility of “pale blue dot” below him. Such anecdotes ornament Friend's reporting on the NASA committee deliberations, which culminate in a modest plan for planetary defense: spend 3 billion dollars over the next decade; launch a new space telescope designed to detection of potentially dangerous asteroids, and test the most promising couple of non-nuclear deflection technologies.
That recommendation comes as something of an anti-climax, but that’s par for the course for apocalyptic non-fiction, honestly told: what can be done is often less thrilling than what may happen if we do nothing. But the deeper disappointment with Planet Killers comes its own uncertainty about what it wants to be — and that literary neurosis, in turn, derives from one of the less obvious challenges that come with writing into e-media.
That is: Planet Killers is an example of one of the two distinct species of works evolving in the midst of the e-book transformation. The gaudier one comes with the application of computing to the text. Think iPad apps, which allow creators to construct works that offer readers the ability to perform actions on and through the words and images of conventional tales. See, for example, Deborah Blum’s review of The Elements, something of a type-specimen of the form. From the scribbler’s point of view, app books also entail new models of working that move towards the ways movies are made, in which the writer is only one, and not always the central creative authority.
The other enabling e-technology preserves the author’s pride and power. Digitization and the ‘net combine to provide plain e-texts with a new channel for publication and distribution of what remain conventional works made up of words and plain images. The cost of such distribution is effectively zero – and while that’s so obvious it hardly bears noting, it still adds up to a genuinely new opportunity for writers. You may remember that dim, distant past of, say, six or seven years ago, when the length at which a writer could tell a story was fixed by the venue, a few thousand words for a magazine, many more for a book, with almost nothing possible in between. If you wanted to treat a subject that might not sustain between hard covers, yet offered more richness than could fit into two-pages-plus-the-jump of a magazine…too bad.
Now? The ‘net doesn’t care if it has to gulp down 5,000 words, 10,000, 25,000 — whatever it takes to do justice to the material at hand. But there’s a catch. A 15,000 word piece is not simply a magazine feature at three or four times the usual length. It’s not a baby book either. Rather, such works demand formal structures of their own, with particular demands of organization, of narrative depth, of pace, and so on. Before you know it, you’ve drifted across the border that King warned about. You’ve entered (non-fiction) Novella, and, if you are unwary, it’s terribly easy to wander down the wrong path.
Which, by the long road home, brings us back to Planet Killers. The problem? There just isn’t that much there, there. Stripped to its narrative scaffold, all you really get are three steps on a short journey: the book begins with the threat of a big rock falling from the sky. We learn that some folks are working on it, without gaining any real depth on what those characters actually did to come up with their ideas. And then we are baldly told that there’s some agreement on an, incomplete response to the challenge. No great obstacles face any of Friend’s people; no event happens within the story that provides any sense of risk or danger; there are no ideas sufficiently developed within the text that yield some thrill, an Aha! that lingers for more than minutes after the last swipe across the screen. In the end, Planet Hunters reads not like a work written to the length it told its author it needed to be, and much more like a magazine article blown up to the dignity of an independent e-text.
Thus the fate of the unwary who venture into the Republic of Novella. The rise of the e-text makes getting there a doddle. Getting out, though? No easier than it’s ever been.
Tom Levenson writes books (most recently Newton and the Counterfeiter) and makes films, about science, its history, and whatever else catches his magpie's love of shiny bits. His work has been honored by a Peabody, a National Academies Science Communication and an AAAS Science Journalism Award, among others. By day he professes at MIT, where he directs the Graduate Program in Science Writing.
SMILE: The Astonishing Power of a Simple Act, by Ron Gutman. TED Books, 2011. Kindle /Nook / iBookstore
Reviewed by David Dobbs
Sometimes when I encounter writing I especially admire, I like to type it out. Say, Nabokov, in The Luzhin Defense, describing his heroine taking a bath amid marital confusion:
As she immersed herself in the bath she watched the tiny water bubbles gathering on her skin and on the sinking, porous sponge. Settling down up to the neck, she saw herself through the already slightly soapy water, her body thin and almost transparent, and when a knee came just barely out of the water, this round, glistening, pink island was somehow unexpected in its unmistakable corporeality.
I type such passages because it seems they might rub off. So when for some reason the passages I had highlighted in my Kindle version of the book under review here, SMILE: The Astonishing Powers of a Simple Act, did not carry from my reading device to my Amazon Kindle highlights web page, where normally I would be able to select and copy them, I frowned, because this malfunction meant that to show you any passages from this book I would have to re-type them, and I feared, dear reader, and still fear, that they might rub off. I will have to read a lot of Nabokov to make up for this.
The problem begins with the beginning, where precisely 11% of this e-book, according to my Kindle, is devoted to setting up a punchline that the title has already shouted loud. The author, a Palo Alto entrepreneur named Ron Gutman, who truly does seem like a nice guy, opens by describing a bus ride he once took in Africa. The driver and all Gutman's fellow passengers greet glumly his foreign face, language, and clothing, then leave him sitting alone, isolated on the crowded bus. After a couple hours of this dusty bus ride, and many, many words, he springs his surprise:
I decided to try something different and do something entirely unexpected. It was time to pull out the special power I had learned and brought with me from my interactions with people I had met during my previous travels through Asia and India, when I had connected with people from other cultures who did not speak any of the languages that I do.
I smiled.
I smiled at everyone around me. I smiled indiscriminately, I smiled widely, I smiled continuously. Whether people looked at me or not, I smiled at them. Although no one responded to my smiles, I started to feel better.
They do eventually respond, of course, and soon the whole bus is smiling. Thus this book is born:
In the heart of a foreign land, away from development and infrastructure, in a closed environment where I looked and felt like an outsider, stuck in a situation where it seemed I could not talk to or understand others, and in the midst of unusual tension that I could not understand or explain, I became aware of the hidden power of the smile.
This smiling reveal may have worked on the bus, and it works, mostly, sort of, in Gutman’s 7-minute TED talk. It does not work on the page. As I seem to remember someone once saying rather cruelly of another writer I'll leave unnamed: What’s important is not new, and what’s new is not important.* And everything is repeated.
Did you know, for instance, that people everywhere smile? This means smiling is universal. Even more amazing: Your smile not only makes the people you smile at feel better, it makes you feel better too. Also, on a separate page very nearby, even as smiling makes you feel better, it makes others feel better! Or did I say that? Anyway, smiling at people also makes them think that you are both more competent and more friendly than they would think otherwise — and, incredibly, your smile also makes them feel more friendly and competent. Plus better.
This can change things. Indeed, if you think about it, smiles have “incredible transformative powers.” Smiles “can dramatically and quickly change social situations, breaking down barriers while forming connections and fostering happiness.” They can also, even as soon as one paragraph later, “create rapport and a human connection.”
Gutman finds this all astonishing — although he usually says “amazing,” presumably to reserve “astonishing” for the book’s subtitle. He is explicitly amazed, in fact, 12 times. (Beware, authors, the power of the Kindle to count your crutch words.) Overall, I would say, what amazes him most is the smile's astonishing power to make things better. He remarks on this power to make things "better” at least 25 times. It excites him. So he exclaims! Alas, Kindle will not find and count exclamation points. Damn!
Mechanisms emerge. Smiling, Gutman tells us, sets up a feedback loop:
To glaze this donut, Gutman turns to science. He finds many studies but, apparently, few commas. Did you know, for instance, that “in two separate studies examining thousands of pictures taken from 1968 through 1993 and 1970 through 1999 researchers discovered that 55 percent to 60 percent of men and 80 percent of women smile in photos from pleasant public situations”? Me either.
Why do people smile so? Because “smiling makes us feel and look better, both to ourselves and to others.” It was about here that my frown began to turn to fury, for while Gutman had related this fact at least ten times already, I was only, my Kindle cruelly revealed, 62% of the way through the book, which was way too far and hardly far enough. Then, in case I’d forgotten this crucial message while checking my progress, he used the next sentence to tell me an eleventh time.
The glaze accrues. “Under certain conditions, when men see women smile at them they interpret that as a sign that the women think they are attractive.” I would never have guessed. Lest I resist this news, however, Gutman offers a study showing that a women who smiles at male patrons as she enters a bar will get hit on far more often than she would if she simply makes eye contact as she walks in — which to me seems a brave enough thing itself. Same goes in libraries, One researcher, in fact, “ended up marrying one of her test subjects who first approached her because of her smile!" Exclamation point his.
Scan studies too enter the picture, arriving as thin, obvious, inevitable, and alluring as a pharmaceutical sales rep at a doctor's office. One fMRI study, for instance — of 28 moms, which is only a few more than the number of times Gutman mentions this effect — showed that Mommy’s pleasure centers light up when Baby smiles. Other scan studies show that a single smile can bring the brain as much pleasure as 2000 chocolate bars or $25,000. Someone tell the chocolate people they're wildly underpricing. And for me, please hold the smile; I'll take the cash.
What can we do with this information? Gutman offers suggestions. Smile. Smile at strangers. Smile at yourself. Smile the first thing on waking. Smile when you’re skydiving. Smile while you’re giving natural childbirth. Offers one smiley devotee, “I smiled through my natural, drug-free labor and fully believe it transformed the whole experience. I recommend smiling to all women going through childbirth.” I would love to have seen this woman recommend that to my wife as she was being wheeled down the hall for a c-section after 40 hours of labor and 4 hours of pushing. In fact, to test the astonishing power of this recommendation, I just now read it aloud to my wife. Her reaction makes me long to see this woman offer her this advice even now. She wouldn't be smiling when she finished.
I don’t mean to be cruel. I’m actually fairly smiley myself. But this book, which as a TED book is supposed to be about "a powerful idea," is a fatty concoction of neuropop, adventure travel, self-help, California woo, and Palo Alto entrepreneurial gush. It pushes positive thinking across some mathematical warp zone that renders it negative. I suspect it would make even the father of positive thinking, Norman Vincent Peale, just fwow wight up.
But don’t take my word for it. I’ll give Gutman a chance to close the deal. Elipses are his:
So, whenever you want to look great, sociable, and competent, or whenever you want to reduce your stress or improve your marriage, or whenever you want to feel as if you’ve just had a huge stack of high-quality chocolate (without incurring the caloric cost) or as if you’ve just found $25,000 in the pocket of an old jacket you haven’t work for ages…. Or when you want to earn the trust of others so you can change the world for the better…. Or when you just want to help yourself and others around you live longer, healthier happier lives … SMILE.
At that I believe I did smile, or at least grimace with relief, for I had finally reached the end.
David Dobbs, the author of The Atavist e-book bestseller My Mother's Lover, writes on science, culture, and sports for publications including The Atlantic, The New York Times Magzine, National Geographic, and Slate. He blogs at WIRED is now writing his fourth book, The Orchid and the Dandelion.
Controlling Cancer: A Powerful Plan for Taking On the World's Most Daunting Disease, by Paul Ewald. TED Books, 2012. (Kindle/Nook/ iBookstore)
There's an inescapability about cancer. It can feel more like fate than a disease. People who smoke can't help but wonder when a cell in their lungs will go rogue and produce a tumor. Living near a toxic dump gives people the sense that someone is playing Russian Roullette with their children, and sooner or later the bullet is going to fire. If you are a woman from a family of breast cancer victims, you can almost hear the clock ticking.
But we must not forget that some cancers are less like fate than they are like the flu. Take cervical cancer. It can't be blamed on bad genes or exposure to chemicals. It's caused by a virus. The human papillomavirus thrives by infecting epithelial cells. It disables their brakes, so that the cells grow faster than normal. To avoid being discovered by the immune system, HPV cloaks host cells so that they appear normal. Most people carry harmless strains of HPV. Your eyelashes are probably coated in them. They don't make the vast majority of their hosts sick because we strike a balance with the viruses. We are constantly shucking off the top layer of epithelial cells from our skin and other surfaces. Infected cells typically don't stick around long enough to cause us trouble. But every now and then, HPV will push a cell on the path to runaway growth and, ultimately, cancer.
Paul Ewald, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Louisville, thinks that we need to let this fact sink in. Most of the research on new cancer treatments goes into searching for ways to blast tumors. This is an expensive strategy that yields relatively little benefit, Ewald argues. Chemotherapy drugs can have awful side effects, and the cancer itself can adapt to the medicine through a nefarious form of natural selection. Mutations that make cancer cells more resistant to the chemotherapy take over the tumor. But if we could stop a significant chunk of cancers in the same way we battle viruses, the fight against cancer may have gotten a whole lot more promising.
In Controlling Cancer, Ewald argues that HPV is far from alone as a cancer-causing pathogen. He points to hepatitis viruses, which are known to cause liver cancer, and the bacteria Helicobacter pylori, which lives in the human stomach and can cause gastic cancer. It stands to reason, Ewald argues, that a lot of the pathogens that make us sick also push us towards cancer. For many viruses, bacteria, protozoans, and animal parasites, it pays to spur cells to replicate quickly and to evade the immune system.
If a lot of cancer is caused by infections, then we may be in a fortunate situation. We can save millions of lives with well-established measures. It doesn't take a miracle drug to block the transmission of hepatitis C, for example. Stopping people from using dirty needles will do just fine. Vaccinations could annihilate some kinds of cancer altogether.
It's a provocative idea, which is par for the course for Ewald. He's long been an advocate for putting medicine on a solid foundation of evolutionary biology. In the 1990s, for example, he came to fame for his ideas about domesticating infectious diseases. The deadliness of a parasite can evolve, and in some situations, it may pay for parasites to be milder instead of meaner. He went on to argue that many supposed chronic diseases–from heart disease to schizophrenia–are triggered by pathogens. Ewald's work has been mostly theoretical–extrapolating from what we know about evolution in general to diseases in particular. His ideas are tough to test, if only because our bodies are so complex. But they have certainly been influential, as scientists have developed better tools for detecting microbes in our bodies and probe their effects on us.
Controlling Cancer is one of the first works published by TED Books–an offshoot of the hugely popular TED talks. (Here's Paul Ewald's 2008 TED talk on domesticating disease.) TED talks are crisp, quick, emphatic, and not too heavy on scientific detail. Their books are, too. Controlling Cancer is a quick read, without any photographs, videos, or other ornaments found on other ebooks. It does include footnotes, where Ewald back up most of his points.
The citations are a good thing, but sometimes it's hard to tell when Ewald citing well-established cases of pathogens causing cancer and when he's only pointing to suggestive hints. The scientific literature is loaded with papers in which researchers describe tumors brimming with viruses. These associations could be evidence of viruses triggering cancer, or they could be evidence that tumors are good places for viruses to breed.
Ewald does point out that this ebook is just a precis of a longer book that's in the works. Controlling Cancer intrigues me enough that I look forward to Ewald making his case in full.
Carl Zimmer writes frequently about science for the New York Times and is the author of 13 books, including A Planet of Viruses
On March 11, 2011, one of the largest earthquakes ever recorded ripped apart a swath of eastern Japan. About an hour later, a huge tsunami wave tore through the wreckage, leaving behind a trail of salinated sludge and a burgeoning nuclear disaster.
You know all of this already, of course. In fact, at this point, the narrative of what happened in Japan—what's still happening, really—has been repeated so many times that you might be tempted to think there's no reason to read yet another take on this situation.
But you should set those thoughts aside. At least, you should set them aside long enough to read William T. Vollmann's Into the Forbidden Zone, a 70-page narrative that tells the beautiful, heartbreaking story about the aftermath of the Tohoku Earthquake and highlights two of the key problems with the way this tragedy has been covered in the popular press.
Vollmann isn't a science journalist. In fact, he's primarily a novelist. If you're looking for a lot of technical details on the science of earthquake prediction, or the real risks of radiation exposure, he can't help you very much.
But, on the other hand, I think that's part of what makes this book so powerful. As someone immersed in the science of news, it's easy to lose track of what an event looks like from any other perspective. As an American, far removed from the actual event, it's easy to get so caught up in seismometers, early warning systems, and debates over nuclear energy—in other words, what could happen to us someday—that we forget about the people all this stuff really did happen to 11 months ago.
Vollmann's book brings the real story—how an earthquake, a tsunami, and a nuclear meltdown have affected the Japanese people—back to the forefront, where it ought to be.
)