Spalling For Chemistry (ha ha ha) + SAM KEAN

by Weston Cutter

I’ll admit at the start of this that I’m not what anybody’d call a chemistry dork, but I would’ve once fit that tag. Less important than the tag, though, is that I’m terribly fond of chemistry—one of my favorite people on earth is a HS chemistry teacher, and, I’m startled over and over to realize, about half of my reading has to do with wanting to talk with the people I love and/or find fascinating (a physicist, a city planner, an actor, a bunch of writers, a few real politically motivated folks). Anyway: chemistry. I’m a fan. As should you be, for all sorts of reasons, but I won’t dig too much presently into it.

And I won’t be digging, of course, because I don’t have to: if you want a quick and certain push into the wonderfully loving arms of chemistry, your book is The Disappearing Spoon, a debut by Sam Kean. Let me say this: earlier this year I proclaimed Joe Flood’s The Fires as the year’s best book, and, while I still stand behind that claim, I’d like to add that Sam Kean’s Spoon features a whole hell of a lot of the same magnificent qualities that made Flood’s book so amazing (also, I’d like to point out that both books are debuts, both authors young white dudes, and both authors names feature the same # of vowels, just in case anyone wants to cross-reference stuff or consider ancilary features I may or may not inadvertently be attracted to).

The first and most prominent feature of Kean’s fantastic book is the casual genius he just shrugs off, casting off like extra spark from some barely-imaginably great conflagration, page by page. I have corroboration of the following: 30 seconds into reading page 67, I stood and started shouting, amazed. Ugly admission: I didn’t know how to pronounce the word scythe until my mid-20s, and there are still a clutch of words I fear saying publicly simply because I’ve only ever read them. Still, I’d like to think I know lots of words—and yet here came Kean, page 67, flattening me with the word spall, which is both a noun and a verb, and has to do with stuff flaking (to spall is the act; the resultant dust from something spalling is spall). Hence the title of this post, too, fyi.

So it’s a casual genius of certain words, yes: that’s true. However, it’s not just that Kean’s linguistically solid—it’s that, as examples, he can draw from all over the place: dude writes with the exact sort of catholocism small, liberal arts colleges hope to engender in their charges. Here’s a nowhere-near-as-great-as-could-be example of just this sort of writing:

“For Lord knows what reason—perhaps lingering undergraduate fascination—this young man decided beer, not hydrogen, was the best liquid to shoot the atomic gun at. He really thought that beer would lead to an epochal breakthrough in subatomic science. You can almost imagine him smuggling Budweiser into the lab at night, perhaps splitting a six-pack between science and his stomach as he filled thimble-sized beakers with America’s finest, heated them almost to boiling, and bombarded them to produce the most exotic particles then known to physics.”

That’s from page 297, and note not just how much Kean knows to get into this stuff, but dig the style, that great, great writing (“splitting a six-pack between science and his stomach” is up there, as far as new favorite phrases). Not coincidentally, in his True/Slant profile, Kean admitted to digging DFWallace, whose influence isn’t tiringly obvious in Kean’s writing, but the great man’s presence is evident in the humor, the kindness, the shocking level of concern Kean shows the reader by trying, over and over, to explian stuff well, thoroughly, clearly. Think I’m kidding? I now understand valences better than I have at any point since advanced chem in 10th grade; even relatively complex notions regarding atomic weight and protons are clear and understandable in Kean’s hands (I’d now like to urge him to write about high energy theoretical physics, specifically the Higgs boson, on which a friend’s spent like 5 years working and doing hard science and math and which I still grasp with a shame-inducing level of tenuousness).

Even with all of that, here’s the real deal: The Disappearing Spoon is actual fun to read. Each element’s touched upon in fascinating ways, from how the element was discovered to how it’s ended up being dominantly used to, well, how the element could be used as a practical joke (hence the book’s title). The Disappearing Spoon is also one of the most memorable books I’ve read in some time, which has lots to do with Kean’s writing: we’ve all read books which are chock-full of interesting data but which, on flipping the thing shut, nothing sticks. Aside from the wonderful word spall, I’ve learned, from Kean, a whole bunch about poisons (though I’ve been in the market for a bit, having a couple months back read D. Blum’s The Poisoner’s Handbook), the weird history of how elements were claimed and named (neither of which processes were standardized for some time), aspects of radioactivity, and, not least, the geographic area in which the most elements have been discovered (too good to give away). Not for nothing, too, Kean pulls off that other near-seismic DFW-type trick: all his footnotes are eminently fun reading. I saw last week that this book got press in one of the recent issues of Time magazine, and it’s very much that sort of book—one which, if the world’s a good place, everyone will be talking about it. Get in on it now.

(Kean’s all over the place online–at True/Slant, above, but also at Slate, where he’s been blogging the periodic table this whole month, plus that was his grinning mug on the NYTimes this weekend—all that’s well worth a glance or twelve. Also, he was great enough to answer some questions over email, which are as follows…)

1. In the most general possible way, what are your influences (I saw somewhere you mentioned DFW–talk as much about him as you want—I’m always asking people how he influences them anyway)? For writing, for living, for (in your particular example) looking at the history of science and Chemistry, etc. Take this in any direction you’d like—Cummings, in that intro from one of his collections, said something about how his poems were competing with July 4th and locomotives; if you’ve got a notion of any relationship your writing’s in akin to that, by all means, share. And how’d you get into writing, too? Before you wrote nonfiction about chemistry and spoons disappearing and Mendeleev, did you write poetry about that stuff? Or short stories?

SPK: Wow, I’ve never tried to compete with a major public holiday. I imagine my reading and influence list would look frightfully disorganized to anyone who tried to catalogue it. I wander between all sorts of genres and styles, from pulp to university press stuff. I’ve even got this amazing pop-up book on my shelf—one of the figures jumps up four feet or something from the page! I do love DFW—love his energy and lively language and heart. There’s nothing he’s ever written that I wouldn’t read. But he can be a dangerous influence, as most great stylists can be. It’s too easy (at least for me) to get excited by an essay he’s written and slip into bad, derivative David Foster Wallace-style writing. In general, I’d say I’m either looking for really vibrant use of language, line-by-line, or a great story.

As for me as a writer: Probably like every other writer out there, I dabbled in writing poetry and fiction in college. And I do miss them at times. I got to interview E.O. Wilson recently, a hero of mine (and now that I’m thinking about it, you could add Bertrand Russell to the list, too). Wilson of course writes nonfiction, but he recently published a novel. When I asked why, he said that people respect nonfiction, but they read fiction—fiction is something you absorb and carry around with you, and that’s very powerful. I also miss the concentration of writing poems, and the obsessive attention to the language. But overall, I’m a nonfiction writer. It just feels right to me.

2. And just as another Minnesotan–where are you from? Did I read right that you went to school at St. Olaf? None of this’s got to be included in the ‘actual’ ‘interview’ or anything, I’m just curious. Though, I’d be interested to hear what midwesternism means to you–I recently asked Ander Monson the same thing, and he ended up saying there was some tying-together characteristic of Great Lake states. I can’t tell/decide about any of it (I now live/teach in IA and it doesn’t feel remotely like MN to me). And as far as bio stuff, the big question is: why are the Twins not your team? (bonus points if you ever worked at the State Fair, just fyi).

I’m from Sioux Falls, South Dakota. And I went to college in Minnesota, but at the U of M. No St. Olaf connection. About being Midwestern, I agree there are differences. I usually don’t even tell people I’m from the “Midwest,” because that conjures up images of Michigan, Ohio, or Illinois—all fine states, but they feel nothing at all like where I grew up. (I usually say “Great Plains,” or “The Prairie.”) I loved growing up in South Dakota. It gave me a solid base for the rest of my life—you feel like a big fish all the time, and I really felt like I’m from somewhere.

As for sports, I do enjoy the Twins and want them to win, but I don’t follow them closely enough to count as a real fan. I’d feel like I was posing, because following sports teams day by day just isn’t in my genes I get 95% of my sports knowledge from reading Bill Simmons, The Sports Guy, on ESPN.com.

Oh, and I did work at the State Fair, if briefly. A good friend of mine, a math major, was running a booth and I took the bus out there and worked my shift 4 p.m. to 8 p.m. shift or whatever. He was an origami enthusiast, and had all this math- and Star Wars-themed origami lying around. As for the fair itself, I liked seeing things on a stick, but was a little horrified about the chocolate-chip cookie scene. There’s this stand where you buy an overflowing ice-cream pail/bucket of the cookies, and people had to eat at least a pound of them before they could even get the lid on. Thankfully, for them, the cookie stand stood right next to the fresh milk booth. (ed. note: I was absolutely one of those people that likely horrified SK, and I’m thrilled to soon again have the chance to eat my way through a bucket of Sweet Martha’s cookies; they’re fantastic).

3. What’s the genesis of The Disappearing Spoon? Was this originally gonna be an obsessively close-look at some specific element, or some specific line of the elements, or the noble gasses or anything, and just kept going? Did you know from the start that it’d be the whole table? Was there any other chemistry or history book The Disappearing Spoon was in dialogue with—like, was there a book that’d come close to doing things right, in your mind, but had missed or swerved, last minute, and so you had to write yours (I’ve never written a book of nonfiction; I haven’t the faintest how they’re generated).

It was definitely obsessive, yes, but I always planned to incorporate the whole table. I really wanted to get at all the elements on there, especially the ones you never talk about in chemistry class. Plus, I knew I could find some great stories about well-known elements like carbon or gold. I’d originally planned for the book to be 118 chapters—one for each element! That didn’t work so well, so I ended up grouping them together by theme.

There are some great books about the periodic table and the elements out there: Nature’s Building Blocks; The Periodic Table: Its Story and Significance; Primo Levi’s The Periodic Table. But nothing quite like what I wanted to do. I wanted a book that combined the best of all these—the breadth of Building Blocks, the details and story-telling qualities of Levi, etc. None of these books did anything wrong or swerved at the last minute, but I knew there was another book about the elements that could be written.

4. I don’t know how to ask this question. Maybe it’ just this: how the hell’d you cover so much ground? How do you know so much? It’d be one thing if this book was stuffier and more fixated/focused; as it is, it’s free ranging and wild, covers more miles than I’d've guessed it would’ve at its outset (no joke: this is one of my favorite books of this year; Joe Flood, another first-book guy, came out with The Fires, which is also nonfiction and also insanely smart and also incredible miles-covering). I meant it before: I don’t know how to ask this question, but the thing is this: there’s almost no way you could research something like this, right? Unless you looked things up by each individual element, then grouped them together later…it just seems intense. If there’s no question in here, I apologize.

I knew some of the stories ahead of time— in school I gravitated toward teachers who told us stories (sometimes at the expense of the time we spent learning science!), so I had a jump start in some sense. And there are a few personal stories (like mercury and titanium). But mostly I got the stories from research and fit them together by rearranging the material multiple times. There was a lot of waste—a lot of stories that didn’t make it. I also made a rule that I was going to stay away from “this is how much of this element there is, and here are its uses.” You can get that straight from any reference book. I really wanted something more lively, which forced me to look into literature or art, areas that I might not have looked into if I’d narrowed my focus. And it was easier knowing from the start that I had so much material to cover in 118 elements. If I’d set out to write something narrower, I might have felt overwhelmed. But knowing upfront there was going to be a lot of material made the flood of material feel more manageable.

5. Why DC, just out of curiosity? Do you love it there? What’s the best and worst part?

I was living in South Dakota after college, and knew I needed to get out of there if my writing was ever going to go anywhere, professionally or artistically. It was either D.C. or New York (the places with the highest concentration of writers), and D.C. seemed safer. New York seems a little overwhelming to me: Too many people around you at all times. And I could never get over not having real grocery stores just down the street. D.C. feels manageable. It’s not unlike the town I grew up in: The buildings are low, nothing’s too far away. The two downsides are (1) that few people stay in D.C. long term—everyone’s always out here for a few years, but with an eye on moving somewhere else, and (2) people in D.C. obsess over politics. That’s not a surprise exactly, but it’s not the I’m-generally-informed-and-have-strong-opinions fixation on politics you find in a lot of places. It’s more an obsession with strategies and messaging that gets a little tedious at times.

6. You’re in a unique position to be able to talk about the value and difference between science and art (not to sound too highfalutin or anything). Not to get to public-service-y, but you clearly have the chops to actually in-a-lab do science and yet, in a time of reading supposedly being threatened and books all but kaput, you’ve written a book instead. Is this a false dichotomy–is there, in fact, no BS in-the-sand line between science and writing, between science and art? Just curious; I can conceive of it from here, for me, as a writer of poetry and fiction, but not in a hard-science realm.

Ha, well, I have to say I was a bit of a flop in the science lab. I’m slightly clumsy (hence my dropping all those mercury thermometers as a kid). Even more than that, I got very annoyed when things didn’t work out in reality as neatly as they did on paper. You spend 90% of your time in labs, probably more, building equipment and fixing things that don’t work right, and it just killed me. I don’t have the temperament for it. That’s why I became a writer: Things do work out on paper! They have to.

There’s certainly a difference between science and art—they have different aims and ideals. If nothing else, their histories are vastly different. What Aristotle had to say on theater and poetry is still relevant, and we still read Homer. But no one can take Aristotle’s science seriously. You don’t have to denigrate him for it, and it’s certainly interesting historically, but it’s just not correct—despite what he said, women do not have fewer teeth than men.

Now, all that said, there’s no reason for antagonism between the sciences and the arts. That’s wasteful. And scientists themselves are human beings and they respond, on a human level, to the kinds of motivations and impulses that drive people to create and write. Scientists also construct narratives about their lives and work, even if they later have to root those ideas out when they present their work professionally. In sum, artists and scientists have different temperaments, but on a Venn diagram, those temperaments would overlap plenty, because they’re both of the same species, after all.

7. What’s the view out your window?

I live on a street where a lot of El Salvadoran businesses are located. I guess this is their pocket of the city. I can see a grocery store, a takeout place, and always some people hanging out on the stoop across the street.

Murder City Girls and a 75th Anniversary

by Weston Cutter

The Girls of Murder City by Douglas Perry

Oh good lord is this a fun book. Easy admission at the outset: I could care less about the musical (or movie) Chicago; I’m exceptionally fond of the town, but for reasons that have nothing to do with female murderers of the early 20th century. In fact, I wouldn’t've guessed, at this book’s outset, that it’d draw me in as it did, simply because it didn’t seem or smell like my cup of tea. But then I cracked it. And then, the next night, I was suddenly already thick into the thing. Then, the next few nights, the thing was done.

And what tremendous ease makes falling into this book’s story so freakishly simple and fun and good? Two words: Douglas Perry. Dude’s writing is astonishing, in ways that are actually tricky and hard to parse. Like the best writers, Mr. Perry takes the reader down a narrative path that, once you’ve trod/read it, feels 100% inevitable yet which, had you thought hard about where you’d be headed, you wouldn’t've guessed where you’d end up. In other words—he perfectly balances surprise and expectation. Here’s the truth: Douglas Perry is a master.

Though let’s give a bit of credit, too, to the three canny women who pack this story’s soul: Belva Gaertner, Beulah Annan, and Maurine Watkins. The first two were beautiful murdereresses (such, such a great word), the last a rookie newspaper writer with a background one wouldn’t presume automatically made her an ideal choice as a crime reporter, and the three of them, together, intersect to form an interesting prism through which the reader’s bound to flash his or her questions as they come, questions which’ll have to do with the surge of liberalism that allowed women to get away with ankle-bearing skirts and public cigarette smoking and (that awfulest vice) jazz, questions that’ll touch in notions of celebrity and public manipulation, questions that’ll have to do with feminism (big, fascinating, hairy, complex questions on that issue, just fyi).

It’s a stellar, stellar book, and Douglas Perry is a fantastic writer, and, not least, this book is coming soon from Viking, which is part of the Penguin imprint, and today, July 30th, is the 75th anniversary of the press. Not only is Penguin one of the biggest and best forces in publishing, and that it has been for so, so long (check what they’ve published, for a run-down: start with Gravity’s Rainbow if you can’t think of anything else), and that, through their various imprints, they still put out much of the most exciting books around (hey there, Stewart O’Nan, Evan Wright, Joe Flood, Zadie Smith, Kurlansky, Vollmann, etc. etc. etc.), but they’ve also supplied a copy of one of their books for us here at Corduroy to give away. Write if you’d like it (it’s a surprise, what the actual book is, but it’s good+worth it), and, for sure, check out the website dedicated to their anniversary. I know, I know: it’s authors who make the books, and we should all, always, write to our favorite authors and thank them for the good work, but the work places like Penguin (and the rest) puts into books is just as laudable, just as important.

NOTE: Contest now closed. Given the response, I’m thinking it’s time to run a book contest every Friday. Look for it, hopefully soon.

JOE FLOOD

by Weston Cutter

It’s got to be more often than annual that this happens, that I read a book and end up so jinxed and amazed by the thing that my world sort of stops. Most frustratingly, when I find myself falling into one of these books, I don’t read as much: I try to force the book slower, and so it means that I spend a whole week or two just staring down one book, taking little readerly nips (something like the same thing’s happening presently with the upcoming Lewis Hyde). The latest book to have coated me in its ambery, time-slowing glow is Joe Flood’s The Fires, which I’ll just go ahead and claim here, barely halfway through the year, as among 2010′s best book. I’d actually like to get behind it right now and just say it’s *the* best book—that’s how hard it is to imagine a better book anytime soon.

Let’s go forensic right off the bat: here’s a chunk of text from the book’s middle, and it contains several of the apsects that make reading Joe Flood such joy:

It was a perfect storm of blight for the Bronx. Redlining and clearance for highways and housing projects chased whites to the suburbs and further segregated the rising black and Puerto Rican populations. Rapid deindustrialization not only caused widespread unemployment and poverty, it changed the very character of (now non-) working-class New York. Men who had worked difficult, low-paying jobs to support their families suddenly found that they couldn’t even do that. Children who watched their fathers go to work—saw the money and respect they earned, internalized the value of work, learned the discipline themselves by selling papers, running errands, or stacking boxes in a nearby store—suddenly saw and experienced very little of that. Social services dealing with the symptoms of joblessness—like unemployment, welfare, and food stamps—surged. Local politicians, who in past decades had secured the support of the newest immigrants by supplying jobs, now turned to those social services as the only rewards they could bestow upon loyal voters.

Look, one doesn’t have to be a writer, or even much of a reader, to have a keen awareness of the monstrous difficulty involved in trying to carefully tease out all attendant threads in a story—narrative’s Rube Goldberg-ian, and just trying to get basic details straight, get clear messages sent through text, is exceptionally hard (If you need evidence: write down with 100% clarity what happened to you in the last 24 hours; now, write down why those things happened. Welcome to the rabbit hole). Look again at that paragraph above: in just more than 150 words Joe Flood’s sketched not just the city planning issues that knocked the Bronx to its knees, but the quick and attendant result of those issues, plus he’s just heartbreakingly elegantly planted the seed of what the future’s gonna hold because of those decisions. That’s Big-Picture socio-economic past, present, and future all in one paragraph; that’s damn near miraculous.

It’s not just that Joe Flood can adroitly break down to constituent-level the most difficult stories, it’s that he can do it so interestingly, so well. The Fires could be a companion or lead-up to Mahler’s achingly great Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx is Burning: Flood’s The Fires is about the bureaucratic decision-making processes that led to H. Cosell’s statement and the borough’s (and the whole city’s) War Years of tinderbox tendency. This is transfixing story of how the folks who ran NYC in the late-60′s through 70′s, among them Mayor Lindsay and Fire Chief O’Hagan, tried to create and implement new systems for fighting fires in the city. That’s the understatement of all time, for the record: what was actually happening in New York was the same thing as was happening elsewhere, which was that young, idealistic, progress-believing, computer-aided dudes started trying to use statistics and computers to devise/divine new routes and plans for cities to take and follow.

Another book that’d be a good readerly companion to The Fires? Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff. In all sorts of ways, the books both sketch the schism that formed post-WWII, the schisms that formed as young pencil-protector-sporting horn-rimmed guys moved into territory that’d, until then, been exclusively the terrain of older, gruffer dudes who relied on feel, instinct and history instead of numbers, data, and stream-lined programs.

What The Fires shows, heavily, in ways that make it occasionally tough to read, is, thankfully, not how dangerous data or modeling can be (meaning: this isn’t some oppositional screed), but how relying exclusively on statistical models is the same degree of wild hubris as relying purely on instinct, on feel. Most impressively, though, is how The Fires shows that the problems which led to NYC’s fires in the 1970′s had everything to do with information, specifically its lack. For instance: for all the statistical analysis O’Hagan and his RAND guys could run, they were woefully inexperienced with slum-building fires, those which ravaged buildings which, for instance, had been changed from the original structures in small but critical ways, but which changes hadn’t been registered or inspected.

The book’s subtitle—How a Computer Formula, Big Ideas, and the Best of Intentions Burned Down New York City—And Determined the Future of Cities—is shockingly fascinating, or should be for anyone with a do-gooder bent (maybe especially for those of us who went to liberal arts schools and have a propensity for social justice). The Fires is an excellently written and fascinating account of various modes of information—experiential vs. numbers-based—being deployed, with the very very best ideals and hopes possible, for the sake of making New York City better. Maybe this, last: the very best books, at least to me, are those which make me think every single other thing in the world somehow relates to them (yes, I’m absolutely one of those dorks who finds connections to DFWallace’s writing in just about everything, though ditto J. Graham and Richard Powers and Conover and the rest of the folks I huff and puff about here). And I’m presently 100% seeing everything through lenses tempered by The Fires. Please, please get behind this book: you owe it to yourself to read something this great, and we all owe it to our cities to read such riveting, fantastic history.

Joe Flood recently answered some questions over email as well, as follows:

In as broad and general a sense as possible: who are some writers who’ve influenced you? Or specific books? Or is there some specific here’s-how-J.Flood-got-into-writing-to-begin-with story? And, maybe more fun (and usually, strangely, more importantly), what’s your writing in dialogue with? (Cummings said his poems were competing with flowers and race cars or something; DFWallace talked about his nonfiction having to contend with Total Noise; is there some mental framework out of which you’re writing?)

Tough question, there are too many answers! In a lot of ways the most important books for me were Hardy Boys books, Jonathan Bellairs, Bunnicula, Matt Christopher sports novels, Mark Twain, Robert Louis Stevenson, the things I read as a kid. In high school and college I read a lot of short fiction, Raymond Carver and Sherman Alexie in particular, and Modernist lit, like F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Joyce. I’m going to be reading from Ulysses for a pre-Bloomsday James Joyce event in a couple weeks with a lot of great Irish and Irish-American writers like Colum McCann and Pete Hamill—I’m simultaneously really excited and incredibly nervous. Over the last five or so years of working on my book though I’ve really focused on reading a lot of narrative non-fiction—Robert Caro, Jon Krakauer, Michael Lewis and Sebastian Junger are some of my favorites. And Urbanist thinkers like Marshall Berman and Jane Jacobs have had a huge influence on the way I view cities and other shared spaces.

In terms of what my writing competes with, I actually referenced your question during a Q&A I did after a reading. I think the biggest thing I try and do is get out of the way of the story. Over the seven or so years I spent researching and writing the book I really became obsessed with the story of the fires and New York in the 1970s. The characters and ideas and swirling influences and back stories and intellectual histories. I figured that if I could boil down and convey even a small part of that story for anyone reading the book, I’d have done my job. Obviously I’m the one choosing which anecdotes and quotes to use, which snippets from other writers and thinkers to incorporate, but I was just trying to keep things moving and stay out of the way. The same goes for the actual writing—I spend a lot of time re-reading out loud to myself, seeing where the words bottleneck themselves or where characters or events get obscured instead of revealed by the writing. That makes it doubly embarrassing when I’m doing readings and find some clunky phrase or poorly constructed sentence—I always think “that many revisions and you didn’t catch THIS?!” but that’s just part of trying to get better.

In the press-release materials for this book, you described the book’s genesis as one borne out of curiousity about the actual story—that you couldn’t find an account of the fires from that time period and so ended up having to write the story. I’m curious if you think there’s a difference in coming to the story out of a need to tell that specific story instead of looking around, as a writer, for a story/problem that hadn’t fully been covered.

Well, how you approach a story obviously affects the way you write (cue: Derrida, deconstructionism, and meta-history musings). But ultimately if the story is good and you have a decent sense of it, it’s the process of uncovering it that matters more than the way you originally found it.

I understand that this may be a horrifically unfair question, but have there been other cities which’ve suffered through something similar to what NYC suffered through? Not the fires, necessarily, but the tragic failure of a centralized root-based problem-solving system?

It’s almost impossible to find a single city that didn’t suffer from a top-down, root-approach to development during the 1950s-1970s. Chicago, Detroit, Boston, Baltimore, Minneapolis, Seattle, San Francisco and dozens more all had expressways laid down without much thought to how it would affect the local economy, had “slums” torn up and replaced with projects and other massive developments without much thought as to what had created the poverty of slums in the first place, or what the people who were evicted from their homes were supposed to do. And it’s not just the US, you look at cities like Brasilia, the Banlieue in Paris and even today with the slum clearance proposals on the table in places like Mumbai and you see the same process at work. Big ideas of carving up cities along supposedly Rationalist lines, claims of helping the poor based on some abstracted conception of poverty, not real understandings of what people want and need in their communities.

Having now spent so much time immersed in this stuff+subject, what have you gleaned as far as what should be done for cities? It seems clear that, by the end, the solution you come to is much more on the Jane Jacobs end of the spectrum (esp. if the other end of that spectrum is Moses), given that we’re living in a time of more and more centralized executive powers (at the federal level and in NYC esp [hello, extended Bloombergian period or Mayorship]).

I think the biggest conclusion I’ve come to about cities is that it’s incredibly easy to disrupt or destroy communities—and by communities I mean interdependent networks, be they social or economic or intellectual. I think Jane Jacobs’ analogy to the environment and how messing with a single species can have untold consequences on a whole ecosystem really holds up well here. Conversely, it’s difficult to use big public policy initiatives to rebuild fractured communities. How do you promote innovation, creativity and cohesion? It’s hard to say.

But I’m also a capitalist—I believe in free markets and their ability to solve problems. That’s not to say they shouldn’t be regulated or kept in check in some circumstances, but the idea behind free markets is that no government or group of experts can say for certain and always what people want and need—those are decisions better left up to small business owners, landlords, churches and community groups, local artists, consumers. Ideally, I think government tries to create situations where markets can operate freely, begrudgingly regulates them when they go astray, and stays out of the way.

This was the great irony of Robert Moses’ career. He was an ardent patriot, anti-communist and supporter of big business, and yet he wasn’t really a free marketer at all. He built projects where commercial life was outlawed, or confined to the spaces and functions he saw fit. He built business-free Jones Beach as an answer to the hurly-burly hucksterism of Coney Island. He gave massive subsidies to companies and industries he liked and bulldozed those he didn’t. He was deeply uncomfortable with confusion, complexity, anything that didn’t seem orderly or wasn’t devised by some panel of experts. The Jacobs-Moses argument is an old one, but I think that their true feelings on capitalism are sometimes forgotten. Jacobs may have been the Greenwich Village liberal and Moses the uptown corporate boardroom type, but it was Jacobs who was the free marketer and Moses the big government socialist.

Are you a sports fan? Specifically a Red Sox fan? And, if so, how’d you end up writing about yr team’s hated rival without growling every day? (I’m a Twins fan, so I’m not asking out of any personal stakes at all)

Hah, yeah I’m a huge sports fan and specifically a Boston fan. I will say, the fact that the Sox won the World Series in ‘04 and ‘07 and the Pats and Celtics have been so good made it a lot easier to live in the Bronx and write about New York. If I’d been forced to carry around the chip I had on my shoulder after all those decades of Bucky Dent and Aaron Boone I’m not sure what I would have done…On a side note, I used to walk from my place on 139^th Street to Yankee Stadium in a Sox jersey whenever Boston was in town and never had any trouble. Usually I wore a Manny Ramirez t-shirt underneath the jersey though, people still have love for the boy from Washington Heights.

This is somewhat sports-related, actually: in the last, what, 15 years, there’s been the huge rise of Sabermetrics; B.James+Co are trying to find new ways to analyze data more accurately. It seems like there’s room for a shift like that in city planning stuff: new ways to use empirical, quantifiable data to show the value of, say, more mixed-use stuff, higher density, etc. This may get too into the wonky side of city planning, but the real tragedy of THE FIRES is that the best-intentioned, fully-number-stocked folks so badly bungled things. The question is: could well-intentioned number-stocked folks not bungle things, if they had different/other numbers?

To start with, I’d say there isn’t a single aspect of city-life that’s as easy to quantify as baseball. Baseball is all discrete relationships: a pitch results in a finite number of possible outcomes which can be broken down and analyzed with (relative) ease. The real world is so much more complicated than that–changing a traffic pattern or re-zoning a neighborhood has so many potential outcomes that you can’t apply the same type of reductive calculus to it. This is the problem Wall Street has run into. A few months ago I interviewed Michael Lewis for AI5000, a financial magazine where I’m the Editor-at-Large, and he said that his newest book about the financial crisis is really the story of Moneyball gone wrong. Statistical analysis can be done really well, but too often the models and numbers go from being a tool to produce more rigorous and better thinking to an excuse for not thinking. “Moody’s rated those mortgage bonds AAA, don’t bother investigating them…Our risk models say there’s no way we can lose by providing insurance on all these credit default swaps, it’ll be fine…” that kind of thing. There are great things to be done with statistics in city planning and a host of other fields, but only by people who are willing to delve into the complexities of what they’re trying to quantify, and have the humility to study and understand how the metrics sometimes come up short.

Just as someone who is now a pretty massive fan of your work: do you have any idea of what you’ll be writing (toward) next? Your work seems awesomely immersive: the man-hours of research to prop this book must’ve been staggering. Have you got any sense of what you’d like next to do?

For the next few months I’m really just focused on promoting the book and writing magazine and newspaper pieces. As you said, I like really delving into a subject and the next book will probably be a big long research project like this one. I can say it probably won’t be as city-focused, right now I’m splitting my time between New York and a really rural part of South Dakota on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation—a lot more cows and horses out there than stop lights and subway cars.

What’s the view out your window?

Gray skies! It’s Memorial Day evening and it feels like the heat has kicked up a little thunderstorm.

(Last thing: there’s a phenomenal interview, plus a really incredible RAND-employee rebuttal in the comments, here)

POISON! (*not the Bret Michaels kind)

by Weston Cutter

Deborah Blum’s The Poisoner’s Handbook came out back in February, but we’re as likely to be tardy as anyone and, thankfully, good books don’t go remotely bad with age. You may’ve heard of Blum before—she won a Pulitzer eighteen years ago at the Sacramento Bee for articles on using monkeys in research and, much more recently, she wrote Love at Goon Park, a book on Harry Harlow and his experiments in the 50′s on baby monkeys and child-raising (if the first 50 pages are any guide, the book’s flat-out riveting; I started it last year and I honestly can’t even remember why I didn’t finish reading it; I’ve meant to pick the thing back up since).

Anyway, Blum: this time out she’s written The Poisoner’s Handbook, a book which, chapter by chapter, deals with the various poisons that featured in early-20th Century deaths (by murder or otherwise), specifically in New York City. The book starts in 1915 with Chloroform and the story of an old folks attendant named Mors, who helped the superintendent “with the ‘removal’ of some of the sickliest, and costliest, residents,” and ends in 1938 with a poisoning whose echoes Blum traced in earlier chapters. On the one hand, we’ve all got the jump on stories like these: we’re offered whodunnit roadmaps on like 50% of television shows, a solid percentage of books + movies, etc. This is ground well-trod. But Blum’s spectacularly great, and here’s why: the book doesn’t start with a whodunnit, it starts with other givens and solves for a different x, specifically: how does one find chemical evidence in a corpse to prove the cause of death is poison? And how does one even begin to isolate which poison?

A sidestreet: I really, really like some of the supersnarky gossipy sites—FilmDrunk is one of the best sites online, certainly among the very best written—and what one sees lots of lately regarding superhero stories are origin stories, how-things-began stories. For instance: the next Spider-Man will be an origin reboot, and there’s an x-men origin movie in the works as well.

Blum’s The Poisoner’s Handbook is, functionally and fundamentally, an origin story for any of those procedural dramas so easy to slip into, slackjawed and thankful for narratives opened and shut conclusively in 41 minutes, and the originators of all those square-jawed chem-lab detectives who find out the killer really was the seemingly-innocent neighbor were Charles Norris, the chief medical examiner in New York City, appointed in 1918, and Alexander Gettler, Norris’s toxicologist. These men quite literally created forensic science, specifically with regard to poisons, and that’d be a fascinating and worth-it story just in itself, but Blum’s got more in store.

What the book does, too (and this could have much to do with the fact that I read this book at the same time I read Joe Flood’s best-book-of-the-year The Fires, about which I’ll write much more soon), is highlight and illuminate the ways in which government steps in and regulates stuff (hello there, Wall Street, and you too, BP). The chapters of The Poisoner’s Handbook which are most riveting are the ones which deal with the monumental spike in alcohol-related deaths which attended prohibition (this book should be required reading, I’d argue, for anyone interested in what a marijuana-legalized country might entail)—those deaths spiked precisely because the government was simultaneously taking a laisez-faire attitude on regulating alcohol itself and cracking the hell down on illegal alcohol consumption (this book has interesting echoes, honestly, with Conover’s Newjack, just in that the prohibition stuff sounds remarkably like the current/problematic prison system [meaning: pay less time/attention/money to the elements which cause/perpetuate crime, crack down exclusively on criminals even though their crimes could've been avoided with a better social safety net]). Ounce of prevention vs. pound of cure and all that.

Anyway, enough theoretico-socio-politico-babble, the point is is Blum’s The Poisoner’s Handbook is one of those real, real rare books: a read that simultaneously fun as hell to read but also smart, thought-stimulating as any literary megavoltage yr likely to find presently bound between hardcovers. I’d suggest strongly that you get this and get right down to enjoying it.