Sugar Love (A Not So Sweet Story), by Rich Cohen, photographs by Robert Clark
This is not the first article in the issue, but I wanted to get it out of the way. My dad handed this issue to me and said, “This will prove to you that I’m right. Sugar is poison.” And, in fact, one of the scientists they quote in the article says so, in exactly those words. Then, they provide us with a graph showing how diabetes is increasing right next to a graph showing that sugar consumption is decreasing.
Come on now, if Tyler Vigen can show a correlation between US Spending on science, space, and technology and suicides by hanging, strangulation, and suffocation, surely the folks at National Geographic can do better than that. As an aside, Vigen’s Spurious Correlations website is a great way to kill an hour or so.
I have to admit that I came to this with a bias. An old friend who is an evolutionary biologist once explained how we’re eating a lot more food than we used to and, this is important, the calories in that food are now more bioavailable than the used to be. We eat more frozen dinners and restaurant food and Lunchables than we did decades ago. We also eat a lot less fiber, and really the more I read, the more I think that fiber is really kind of key here; fiber lowers “bad” cholesterol, effects hormone levels for the better, and increases insulin sensitivity. She explained that our ancestors probably went through something very much like our current obesity epidemic once we started cooking our food. Cooking breaks down the foods and makes, you guessed it, the calories more bioavailable. Her belief is that those whose genes could cope with the additional calories used those extra calories to build smarter brains capable of things like language and music and civil engineering.
Cohen also tells us that people are eating less fat and are getting larger. If Americans really were eating that much leaner, wouldn’t McDonald’s now be a salad bar restaurant? It isn’t. They still serve deep-fried all sorts of things. The deli at my store used to sell roasted chicken legs. No more. Now, unless one of the few fresh salads available (and the last time I had one of those, it tasted like old refrigerator) or sliced meats and cheeses it’s deep-fried (I don’t eat much at the deli since they got rid of the roasted chicken legs). Taco Bell’s new thing is cheese, sour cream, and meat in a deep-fried shell. Meanwhile, my local salad bar place just closed. If you can’t tell, I’m not real persuaded that low-fat dieting is the culprit here.
Oh, and I’m not a professional editor, but shouldn’t “not so sweet” be hyphenated? It’s a compound adjective modifying “story,” isn’t it?
I’m just having the worst time getting my schedule back together. Let’s see if I can get this post out now and get my Manitowoc post written today. That’ll get me back on schedule.
Out of the Shadows, by Richard Conniff, photographs by Steve Winter
Out of the Shadows is about the increasing contact, and conflicts, between humans and leopards in places like India and Africa. All over the world, humans are encroaching on the territories that previously had been dominated by top-level predators such as leopards. Sometimes the predators retreat, but sometimes, as is happening with leopards, the predators adapt.
Conniff takes us to some places where leopards and humans are coming into conflict and lets us into some of the research on how these two species can coexist peacefully.
Personally, I am always struck by the camera trap photographs of big cats. In the December 2013 issue, we had the article Ghost Cats. I had the same experience there. For some reason, the automatic cameras they use in their camera traps make the cats seem to look almost like they are taxidermied. Are the shutters of the cameras that fast? Or is there some other mechanism at work that makes the cats look, not just like they are not moving, but like they are actually stationary?
Remnants of a Failed Utopia, by Rena Silverman, photographs by Danila Tkachenko
Tkachenko visits places that used to be communist and photographs the buildings and machines that they left behind. For this project, Tkachenko photographs these structures in snow, which diffuses the light, making for haunting images of a “lost civilization.” For some reason, the images chosen for this issue have almost no color (for example, there are only traces of color in the photograph of the Bartini Beriev airplane, which made me wonder at first if Tkachenko also used black-and-white film.
New New York, by Pete Hamill, photographs by George Steinmetz
Hamill, who was 80 years old at the time he wrote this article, grew up in New York City. He explored it on foot and by subway through the decades, and in New New York, he looks back at the New York City of his youth and compares it to the New York City of today. To some extent, Hamill seems to be having a “hey, you kids, get out of my yard” moment, to the extent that they have yards in New York City. You know what I mean.
One of Hamill’s chief complaints is that the old neighborhoods are going away, being replaced by high-rise apartment buildings. I have to admit that I share Hamill’s disdain for 432 Park Avenue, a big stick with windows a couple of blocks southwest of Central Park (see image). However, part of the loss of neighborhoods can be placed on the emphasis on suburbs in the United States over the last seventy years. Men who went off to fight in World War II came home and moved out of the cities into the suburbs, where instead of streetcars, they had automobiles and instead of neighborhoods, they had housing developments. Three generations (1946-1966, 1966-1986, and 1986-2006) have grown up living in separate boxes and traveling to jobs, schools, stores, churches, etc., in separate boxes. The cohesiveness of a neighborhood is foreign to them. And now, to get ahead in their jobs, they are moving into the cities and taking their isolation with them.
432 Park Avenue, taken from the Empire State Building, July 2015. You can see Central Park off there in the distance.
Hopefully this isolation will only be temporary. Once they discover the joys of being able to walk where they need to go, neighborhoods will form again. Their children’s generation will be likely to connect, and reconnect, in both new and old ways. Perhaps the old neighborhoods will never return, but it will be interesting to see what this new generation of city dwellers will create.
Haiti on Its Own Terms, by Alexandra Fuller, photographs by students of FotoKonbit
FotoKonbit is a project that allows Haitians to borrow cameras and photograph Haiti as they experience it. Too many people outside Haiti merely hear of strife, poverty, and natural disasters. FotoKonbit works with students both in the cities and in the rural areas to learn photographic skills and to show the outside world the beauty of Haiti as well.
The text accompanying these photographs goes into the history of Haiti and also a bit of its future. You see, Haiti has billions of dollars of resources under its soil and someday people may come from outside to exploit them. This could be a benefit, if the companies extracting the wealth do it in a responsible manner and pay a fair price, or a disaster, if the companies follow business as usual and ruin the environment while cheating the Haitians out of what is fairly their own.
We get a lot of lists of ships and ocean depths here. Also lists of the temperatures and salinity of the ocean at different locations. Really gripping stuff. Why are there no charts in this article? A few nautical charts or maps or something would have made this much more intelligible.
At this point, Dyer seems pretty convinced that oceanic currents stem exclusively from wind; things like differentials in temperature and/or salinity didn’t figure into it at all, apparently. So, from a “so this is what things were like when people were just starting to science,” perspective, this article was pretty interesting.
Report — Geography of the Air, by A.W. Greely
At this point, I can’t even. Really, the opening sentence says it all, In presenting to the National Geographic Society a summary of geographic advance as regards the domain of the air, the Vice-president finds a task somewhat difficult. I would think so, because, well, air. It moves, which is something that apparently the National Geographic Society was just figuring out in 1889.
This list in this article is of meteorologists and what they’ve discovered, which was actually a bit more interesting than most of the lists in this issue. Still not a page-turner, but at least something to hold the interest for a while.
Report — Geography of Life, by C. Hart Merriam
Merriam admits upfront here that he cannot summarize what others have done this year in terms of the “geography of life,” because there have been no publications on the topic. So, he instead spends his nine paragraphs on what he believes the purpose of the Department of Life to be.
This made article one of the few interesting parts of this issue, even if it’s a bit difficult to summarize. Merriam envisions making maps of where different species are to be found and then being able to create “natural faunal districts” from them. I wonder if he ever followed through on this plan.
Next up, more December 2015 (we go to New York City next) and then, on my roughly-weekly walk on Monday, April 11, I will keep reading July 1889. I’m going to spend about an hour walking, so I doubt I’ll be able to make it through all of the rest of The Rivers and Valleys of Pennsylvania (I’ve tackled the first two of the five sections at this point), but I’ll give it my best shot.
As I write this, on April 2, 2016, I am almost done with the June April 1889 issue. I should finish it tomorrow during my greenway hike. I haven’t decided which greenway I’m going to hike on. It’s likely that it’ll be the Leon Creek Greenway, since I’m closer to being finished with that one. I’ve only walked from about halfway between Huebner Road and Hardberger Park to the point where the trail goes under US 281.
Update, April 3, 2016: I ended up finishing up the northern end of the Salado Creek Greenway. Now I can say that I’ve walked that entire greenway north from US-281.
The Virgin Mary: The Most Powerful Woman in the World, by Maureen Orth, photographs by Diana Markosian
As I’ve mentioned before, I’m not Catholic. As a Protestant, I don’t believe that Mary stayed a virgin after the birth of Jesus. The “brothers and sisters” mentioned in verses like Matthew 13:55 & 56 and Mark 6:3 are, well, the children of Mary and Joseph. Not Jesus’s cousins. Not the children of Joseph and an unnamed first wife. Therefore, throughout this article, I will strive to always call her just “Mary.” I did grow up in a predominantly Catholic area, so an occasional “Virgin Mary” may slip in.
This article focuses largely on apparitions of Mary. We start in Medugorje, and make mentions of Fatima, Portugal; Kibeho, Rwanda on our way to discuss the “Virgin of Guadalupe,” the 1531 apparition of Mary to Juan Diego (who was canonized in 2002) on Tepeyac Hill in Mexico City. After Mary appeared to Juan Diego, the bishop wanted some proof, so Mary had Juan Diego fill his cloak with roses. When Juan Diego brought the roses to the bishop, the cloak had the image of Mary on it. The cloak has been on display in an series of shrines, churches, and finally, a basilica since then. Orth spends a couple hundred words describing the image, yet there is no picture of it in the article. I took a quick trip down to the Oblate Seminary to visit their Tepeyac Shrine (and also their Lourdes Grotto and the accompanying chapel), then discovered that the Wikimedia photograph I had used as a reference when reading the article was in the public domain, so I’ll be including that (if WordPress will let me upload it. Grrr.). I am pretty proud of the picture of the statue that I took, though, so maybe I’ll use that, as well.
The image of the Virgin of Guadalupe on the cloak of Saint Juan Diego. A public domain image downloaded from Wikimedia Commons
One turn of phrase had me wondering about Orth’s religious background. She describes the image on the cloak as perhaps showing Mary “dancing in prayer.” This is not a common phrase. In fact, Google has only around 79,000 hits for the phrase, and at least once, there’s a comma in between “dancing” and “in.” Apparently, she is Catholic, so I wish she had elaborated on that phrase.
Orth also discusses the importance of Mary in Islam and we meet Muslim women who go into Christian churches to venerate Mary. Orth also tells about an apparition of Mary in Cairo, Egypt, in the late 1960s and early 1970s. And then we finally get to Lourdes. The Song of Bernadette with Jennifer Jones was one of my favorite movies when I was growing up (I seem to recall that they used to show it every Easter on WGN). When we were moving during my childhood, we kept the stuff that we didn’t want the movers to handle in a self-storage place that backed up to I’m-not-even-sure what. A kind of unkempt marshy area. I used to like to visit it and never quite understood why until my mom pointed out that it looked kind of like the grotto from the movie. So I quite liked this part, though I was still kind of annoyed at the lack of images of the Virgin of Guadalupe that I didn’t like it as much as I should have.
The Science of Delicious, by David Owen, photographs by Brian Finke
I wasn’t sure what to expect of this article, since I’m a “nontaster.” Stuff like mayonnaise and sour cream tastes nasty to me, as do wine and cilantro. As a result, I’m far more motivated by texture than by flavor. I don’t like the texture of fat in my mouth, so when the low-fat diet became a “thing,” it was wonderful. I could order chicken without the skin or other lean protein choices without seeming like a “picky eater.” I could order things without the heavy cream sauces or avocado and the waiter would just chalk it up to attempting to be a healthy eater.
Owen assumes that everyone experiences broccoli as bitter, but I don’t. I’m highly motivated by my sense of smell, so while I quite like raw broccoli, I don’t eat cooked broccoli at all. Cooking brassicas (broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, etc.) releases sulfur compounds which makes them smell bad. Anything that smells like that will never make it past my nose. I have one co-worker whose daily lunch of microwaved broccoli nearly drove me from our break room more than once.
Aside from the anti-broccoli bias, the article is pretty even-handed. It mostly talks about the relatively recent discovery that the tongue really has the same kinds of taste buds all over it (as opposed to the mapped out areas that people of my age learned about in school) and that we have two senses of smell — the one that comes through our noses and one that comes up the back of the nasal cavity. The smells that go up the back of the nasal cavity register in the same part of the brain that registers taste.
Owen talks about sweetness a lot, and this is another place where I am an outlier. Artificial sweeteners (including sucralose) taste bitter to me. The only non-sugar sweeteners that taste good to me are the sugar alcohols such as mannitol and xylitol. Fortunately, I don’t seem to be subject to the digestive distress that some experience from sugar alcohols.
My now-ex, Alex, and I all took an actual test to determine our taster gene status. I bought testing papers from a scientific supply company and everything (this is why I can say for certain that I’m a nontaster). Alex is a supertaster and his tastes and mine are much closer than either of ours with his dad (who is a regular taster). Alex actually prefers things a little blander and lower-fat than I do, even.
Untamed Antarctica, by Freddie Wilkinson, photographs by Cory Richards
I frequently tell people that I want to go “everywhere.” And I really do. However, if going to places like Kenya and India and the Netherlands and Australia mean that places like the Wohlthat Mountains end up being squeezed out, i won’t be too disappointed.
Wilkinson, Richards, and two other adventurers, Mike Libecki and Keith Ladzinski, went off to the unclimbed mountains of Queen Maud Land in Antarctica with the goal of summitting as many mountains as they could. We accompany the team up a spire that they name Bertha’s Tower, named apparently for Libecki’s grandmother. They take two weeks to climb Bertha’s Tower, and at one point, Wilkinson has to spend the night outside of their shelter in just a sleeping bag.
Untamed Antarctica was a very quick read, and I found it fascinating, but the desire to follow in their footsteps just wasn’t there.
Kinshasa, Urban Pulse of the Congo, by Robert Draper, photographs by Pascal Maitre
We’re back in Africa again, only there’s not so much unrest this time. Rather, Kinshasa, Urban Pulse of the Congo, is about the art scene in Kinshasa, capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. We meet painters and sculptors and performers, seeing how they express their fears and concerns and, sometimes, their hopes.
All is, of course, not rosy. This is the Democratic Republic of the Congo here. Draper has to deal with street children and corrupt officials. But Draper makes it through and even gets to comission a painting of his dog from one of the artists profiled.
We will see/have seen the team of Pascal and Maitre in October 2015, when they travel up the Congo River to Kisangani.
Failure is an Option, by Hannah Bloch
Failure is an Option is a meditation on failure and the importance of failing. Failure is an important, and possibly even necessary, part of progress. Before you learn what you can do, you sometimes have to learn what you can’t.
My own favorite meditation on failure, by the way, is the 2007 Disney movie Meet the Robinsons. As Billie Robinson says, From failing, you learn. From success, not so much.
Rising Seas, by Tim Folger, photographs by George Steinmetz
Oh, look. Another article about climate change. What a surprise.
This time we’re focusing on New York City and what can be done to protect it from both rising sea levels and from future storms like Sandy. One possibility is to build storm barriers and another is to build a chain of barrier islands. Apparently there used to be barrier islands in New York Harbor, but they were removed “by . . . landfill projects,” which I assume means that the islands are now part of either Manhattan or one of the other boroughs.
Folger suggests that New York City look to the Netherlands for ideas. The Eastern Scheldt barrier which protects Zeeland, is built to a much higher standard than is usual in the United States. The dike system in Holland is not walls, as we picture, but are sometimes built almost invisibly into the landscape (Folger visits one that just looks to the casual observer to be an ordinary hill). Rotterdam is also working on building floating buildings and are planning on having floating residences actually in the harbor.
We return to the United States and talk about some of the other places that could benefit from these kinds of remediations, including New Orleans and Miami. Miami is a special case, however, because it sits on a limestone base, which means that you can’t block out the sea water — the water will just come up from underneath. This might be a job for those floating buildings that they are working on in Rotterdam.
Big Bird, by Olivia Judson, photographs by Christian Ziegler
I always loved dinosaurs. When we visited the Field Museum, I always had to visit the dinosaur hall. My now-ex also always loved dinosaurs. Early on in our relationship, we talked about how we’d always wanted to take the time to count the bones in the apatosaurus’s tail (though we still called it a brontosaurus at the time) but that the adults we were with always would get bored before we finished and drag us away. So, of course, early in our relationship, we went to the Field Museum and counted the bones in the tail. It was nearly 30 years ago, so I can’t remember the exact number we got, but 82 sounds familiar. 82? 182? I can’t remember anymore.
With two dinosaur-loving parents, it was no surprise that Alex turned out to be fond of the big critters as well. A wonderful thing had happened in the time between my childhood and Alex’s — they discovered that birds are theropod dinosaurs. I never had to tell Alex that dinosaurs were gone — they were all around us. It was magic.
The San Antonio Zoo is kind of bird-intensive. The zoo has something like 750 species, 170-some of which are birds. When I bring someone new to the zoo, I always tell them that I need to show them our dinosaurs. They usually expect me to take them to the Komodo dragons. Instead, I take them to the cassowaries — the birds have big three-toed dinosauresque feet and a casque on the head that always makes me think of parasaurolophus (the duck-billed dinosaur that has a crest on its head).
A cassowary at the San Antonio Zoo, 2014
This is a roundabout way of saying that I love cassowaries and loved this article. Judson takes us to the Daintree Rainforest in Australia in search of cassowaries. We “meet” Dad, who has four chicks (cassowary fathers take care of the young) and learn about the importance of cassowaries in the ecosystem. Cassowaries eat fruit and the seeds pass basically undigested through their digestive tract. This spreads plants around and increases diversity in the rainforest. One tree, Ryparosa kurrangii, basically only germinates when it’s been pooped out by a cassowary. Scientists are unclear on why being partially digested has such a beneficial effect on the seeds.
We also learn some of how humans are threatening the future of the cassowary. As humans encroach on their territory, there is less space for the cassowary. Some are killed by dogs or in traps. And some die by being struck by vehicles. There are several schools of thought about how to help the cassowary in the future, but no consensus has been reached yet.
Well, we’re back to the 19th century now. There were only three issues in 1889, so this should go pretty quickly, provided I get enough hiking alone time to knock out the LibriVox versions of the issues.
Africa, Its Past and Future, by Gardiner G. Hubbard
Africa, Its Past and Future was surprisingly less racist than I was expecting. Now, I was expecting racism of both the “native Africans are lazy and useless” and of the “white people need to save them” types.
We start out strong, with an acknowledgement that Africa was civilized centuries before Europe was, then take a sharp downhill slide with the line “For ages upon ages, Africa has refused to reveal its secrets to civilized man.” Really? Ugh.
Let’s not even begin on Hubbard’s explanation that the Negro can find the “Mohammedan” afterlife more comprehensible than the (apparently superior) Christian afterlife. I can’t even.
Quite a large number of words are wasted in descriptions of where geographical features such as rivers, lakes, and mountains, are in relation to one another. I spent quite a lot of this time wishing they’d just put a map in the issue. And there is a map, but only of which areas of Africa are colonies of which European nations. Nowhere, apparently, is there a just plain, you know, map.
Hubbard also talks about the colonization of Africa by Europeans, about how exploration of Africa (again, by Europeans) progresses, about the slave trade, about mining and mineral wealth, and about the titular future of Africa.
As to the future, as promised in the title, this article ends in a big question mark. Apparently they can’t deliver what they promised.
Report — Geography of the Land, by Herbert G. Ogden
This was so gripping that I’m not a bit surprised that National Geographic has become a byword for engrossing education on the world around us.
That was a lie. This was so. Boring.
Parts that were sort of memorable were the “barbarous tendencies” of the Africans, the “semi-civilized races” of Asia, and Ogden’s breathless anticipation of the surveys of New Jersey and Massachusetts.
National Geographic became more of a general interest publication in 1915, if I recall correctly. That means I only have another 16 years of this to go before it gets interesting. If I get that far.
Against the Tide, by Kennedy Warne, photographs by Kadir van Lohuizen
We leave Greenland, heading towards a much smaller island, well, technically an archipelago made of much smaller islands. The first thing I learned from this article is the correct pronunciation of “Kiribati.” Apparently the “ti” has more of an “s” sound than a “tee” sound. This is one of the side effects of getting as much information as I do from written sources — you don’t necessarily know how to pronounce what you are reading. I actually pronounced “Obama” to rhyme with “Alabama” the first time I said it aloud.
Kiribati is threatened by rising water levels. The islands are actually coral atolls, and so they aren’t far enough above sea level to resist for long. According to this article, the capital “will be uninhabitable within a generation.” How long is a generation? 25 years? 30 years? 50 years? The article doesn’t say, but it’s probably not enough time.
The article is mostly an overview of what the I-Kiribati, what the people of Kiribati call themselves, are doing to help survive the foreseeable future. They are learning to plant new crops, adding mangroves to the shoreline to help hold the islands together, and beginning to harvest rainwater from their roofs. Hopefully we’ll find some way to help slow the warming of the earth before it becomes too late for the I-Kiribati and the other people of low-lying islands.
Who Will Thrive? by Jennifer S. Holland, photographs by Joel Sartore
Most of this issue surrounded the questions of how humans will adapt to the changes that the future will bring to the Earth. This article looks into how the non-human animals that we share the planet with will fare. We don’t know yet which will do well, but it looks like, in general, the faster a species reproduces, the better it will probably do. The more specialized its environment needs to be the worse it will do.
Pulse of the Planet by Peter Miller
In Pulse of the Planet, Miller looks at the kinds of imaging and sensors that we have available to us these days. Some have been in use for a while, and some are brand new.
And back we go into the climate change special issue.
How to Live With It
This isn’t really an article as such. It’s just a collection of infographics or whatever on how water temperature, crop yields, surface temperature, weather, and our health are projected to change over the next decades.
Melting Away, by Tim Folger, photographs by Ciril Jazbec
Melting Away is about the changing cultures of the indigenous people of Greenland. Pretty much all of the agriculture in Greenland takes place in the south, so the thousands of people who live along the coasts stretching northwards still rely on hunting for their livelihoods. As the ice shrinks, the migration patterns of their food animals is changing and making it more difficult to maintain their lifestyle.
Younger people are moving to the cities (for reference, Nuuk, the largest city in Greenland, has about half the population of the suburb that I grew up in), which means that the older way of life in the more central and northern areas of Greenland may be dying out.
As an aside, Greenland’s flag is awesome. It may be my favorite flag ever. It’s simple and yet the off-center circle adds interest.
The flag of Greenland. Public Domain image created by Jeffrey Connell.
Two more articles to go, which I will probably post on or around March 20, and then on to September 2013.
