I used to keep a picture on my desk, taken on Castro Street, in 1983, at the moment when it seemed as if gay life in San Francisco was ending forever. There were two men in the photograph: the first, tall and gaunt, was leaning over the other, who was in a wheelchair, tucking a blanket around what little was left of the wasted man. A friend had given me the picture just before I began covering the AIDS epidemic for the Washington Post, along with a message. “Don’t forget these people when you write this story,†he told me. “This is not about policies. It’s about being human.†My friend died a few months laterâ€"nearly three decades ago. I must have spent a thousand hours staring at that photograph during the years since then, enough time to memorize the deep sadness in the hollow black eyes of both men.
I have covered wars, before the epidemic began and since. They are all ugly and painful and unjust, but for me, nothing has matched the dread I felt while walking through the Castro, the Village, or Dupont Circle at the height of the AIDS epidemic. It could seem as if a neutron bomb had exploded: the buildings stood; cars were parked along the roadside; there were newsstands and shops and planes flying overhead. But the people on the street were dying. The Castro was lined with thirty-year-old men who walked, when they could, with canes or by leaning on the arms of their slightly healthier lovers and friends. Wheelchairs filled the sidewalks. San Francisco had become a city of cadavers.
In 2002, while writing a Profile of Larry Kramer, the dark prophet of the American AIDS epidemic, I spoke to Tony Kushner, who received a Pulitzer Prize for his brilliant play about that time, “Angels in America.†He told me what those days did to him. “I had just started coming out of the closet, and gay life had seemed so exciting,’’ he said. But by the time he had finished reading Kramer’s shocking article “1,112 and Counting,’’ which appeared in 1983 in the New York Native and demanded that gay men start to take notice of the catastrophe they faced, Kushner realized that “we were confronted with a genuine plague. People were beginning to drop dead all around us, and we were pretending it was nothing too serious.â€
Kramer and many other activists changed all that. Outrage and new medicines largely overcame denial and hatred. In the years that followed, the epidemic seemed to go awayâ€"though of course it never did, here or anywhere else. (By the end of this year, AIDS will have killed nearly forty million peopleâ€"most of them in Africa.) And this week, in a powerful story in the Times, Donald McNeil pointed out that those most wretched days could return. “Federal health officials are reporting a sharp increase in unprotected sex among gay Americans,’’ he wrote, “a development that makes it harder to fight the AIDS epidemic.â€
That is a genteel way to put it. Thomas R. Frieden, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, was a bit more frank. “Unprotected anal intercourse is in a league of its own as far as risk is concerned,’’ he said. Three decades of data demonstrate the truth of that statement. If unprotected anal intercourse is rising among gay menâ€"a trend noted not just in America but in much of the Western worldâ€"the rates of HIV infection will surely follow.
Why is this happening? Put at least some of it down to human nature. Why do people refuse to vaccinate their children against measles or whooping cough? In many cases, because they have never seen measles and have no idea what it might do. (For perspective, more than a hundred and fifty thousand people died of measles in the developing world last year.) HIV is far more dangerous than measles, but also much more complicated. HIV is tied up with sex, a basic human need, but also with desire, shame, discrimination, and fear. What twenty-year-old man, enjoying his first moments of sexual adventure, is going to be scared because, ten years before he was born, people like me saw gay men writhe and vomit and die on the streets where he now stands? For a while, in the nineties, gay men were scared, and the statistics showed it. They used condoms regularly, and tested themselves to see if they were infected. Many still do, but others began to weary long ago of the sexual and emotional straitjacket. A drug like crystal meth (which erases inhibitions and greatly enhances sexual pleasure), while addictive and attractive, also presented an obvious and immediate drawback: it caused a condition known as “crystal dickâ€â€"no erection, no sex. Then people began to combine crystal with Viagra, and a new surge of infections began.
Can we halt this epidemic once again? Of course, or at least the dangers can be greatly reduced. But of the more than a million Americans who are infected with HIV (there are fifty thousand new cases a year), many have no decent health care, and nearly a third are not even aware they are infected. Racism, homophobia, and poverty continue to drive much of the epidemic. Minorities have the highest infection levels and are least likely to have access to satisfactory medical attention or drug treatments. Obamacare will help, but how fast or how well, nobody yet knows. This should be repulsive to us all; those people need education immediately, but there is little public funding available to teach young gay African-American men how to have sex with each other safely. That’s the society we seem to have become.
The only appropriate conclusion here is to listen, again, to Larry Kramer’s warning. What was true in 1983 may well become true again. “If this article doesn’t scare the shit out of you,’’ he wrote in “1,112 and Counting,†“we are in real trouble. If this article doesn’t rouse you to anger, fury, rage and action, gay men have no future on this earth. Our continued existence depends on just how angry you can getÂ… Unless we fight for our lives we shall die.â€
PHOENIX â€" Fritz Clapp, a 67-year-old lawyer with a bright red mohawk, practices intellectual property law. Years ago, his clients were “small-time businesses that nobody had ever heard of.†Then he found something bigger. Today, Mr. Clapp, an eloquent and irreverent man known to wear a purple fez during negotiations with other lawyers, represents the interests of a group not commonly associated with intellectual property: the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club. His main role is not as a bulldog criminal defense counsel for the notorious group but as a civilized advocate in its relentless battle to protect its many registered trademarks.
Just in the past seven years, the Hells Angels have brought more than a dozen cases in federal court, alleging infringement on apparel, jewelry, posters and yo-yos. The group has also challenged Internet domain names and a Hollywood movie â€" all for borrowing the motorcycle club’s name and insignias. The defendants have been large, well-known corporations like Toys “R†Us, Alexander McQueen, Amazon, Saks, Zappos, Walt Disney and Marvel Comics. And they have included a rapper’s clothing company, Dillard’s and a teenage girl who was selling embroidered patches on eBay with a design resembling the group’s “Death Head†logo.
The Hells Angels remain etched in the popular imagination as sullen, heavily muscled men in leather vests who glare from behind raised handlebars, ready to take on anyone who crosses them â€" rebels with no particular cause but their own form of ritualized brotherhood. But over the years, the group collectively made a leap from image to brand, becoming a recognizable marque and promoting itself on items as varied as T-shirts, coffee mugs and women’s yoga pants. Sonny Barger, 75, the longtime Hells Angels leader, at times has offered his own online bazaar of goods that bear his name: sunglasses, bottles of cabernet sauvignon and books he has written.
With more to sell and more to protect, the Hells Angels’ turn toward the litigious comes with a twist: The bikers are increasingly calling on the same legal system they deride as part of the machinery that has unfairly defined them as criminals.
In fact, they have become more conscious of protecting their image from misuse even as law enforcement officials have cracked down on the Hells Angels, saying they represent a criminal gang on six continents, trafficking drugs and guns and engaging in money laundering, extortion and mortgage fraud.
These conflicting portraits â€" biker club versus biker mafia â€" took shape in numerous interviews with Hells Angels members, defense lawyers, prosecutors and federal agents and in a wide review of legal filings and internal Hells Angels documents. The group’s less confrontational side has emerged as its aging membership has been refreshed by new members from a historically familiar source â€" recent military veterans â€" and as motorcycling in general has risen in popularity across the country.
“We stabbed and slabbed people left and right in the day, but that way is less common now,†said Richard Mora, known as Chico, a Hells Angels member in the Phoenix chapter.
Even so, 65 years after the Hells Angels was founded in Fontana, Calif., it still exists as a uniquely American subculture of hardened individualism, fierce fraternity and contempt for society’s mores.
In its rule-bound world, only full members are permitted to wear the provocative death’s-head patch or the two words of the club’s name, which, like the logo, is trademarked by the organization. Separately, the group sells so-called support merchandise to the public on club websites and at Hells Angels parties and charity events. Recently the club opened a retail store in Toronto.
Designations such as 81 (H and A are the eighth and first letters of the alphabet) and Big Red Machine (Hells Angels’ colors are red and white) are on an array of goods, including T-shirts (children’s sizes available), beanies, tank tops, bikinis, underwear, pins, cigars, key chains, window decals and calendars.
The FDA claims it halted the sale of 23andMe‘s flagship Personal Genome Service (PGS) kit due to concerns over its validity and the possibility that clients may suffer from mental anguish when faced with the possibility that their genetic code puts them at risk of serious diseases. In other words, the FDA is worried about patients flooding doctors’ offices holding their genetics reports demanding to be tested for various ailments.
From a medical standpoint, it could be logistical nightmare for doctors. From a patient’s perspective, however, it is absolutely important to be armed with the information. Yes, there is no guarantee that if a genetic marker is identified, it will actually turn into an illness. It may not even provide a complete view of the risk. And, absolutely, environmental issues can also result in mutations that will turn into diseases that may not be reflected in an individual’s genetic code. But if there is even a chance that a person has a heightened risk for a certain ailment, they have a right to explore that.
I sent away for my $99 genetic kit this past summer. For me, it wasn’t a medical quest but rather a quest to seek out my ancestral heritage. In addition to identifying genetic markers, a PGS kit can also provide an ancestry composition, indicating the percentage of your DNA that comes from populations globally. All I knew of my history was that my Muslim parents migrated from India to Pakistan during Partition, leaving behind family heirlooms that could have shed light on their ancestors’ journey into the subcontinent.
When my results came back, my ancestry composition turned out to be fascinating. But my medical report was even more compelling.
My health traits report indicated an elevated risk for autoimmune disorders, including Hashimoto’s disease. That hit home for me. After a 6-year struggle with multiple doctors to figure out what was wrong with me, I received my official diagnosis of Hashimoto’s in August, just weeks before I received my 23andMe results back. Perhaps if I had had a report indicating the possibility of such an illness in my genetic code, I could have been spared the headache of dealing for years with skeptical doctors who thought my ailments were all in my head.
While there are always some prone to histrionics, it’s probably safe to assume that 23andMe clients generally know that the health report is just an indication, not a diagnosis. The company even states that its report is purely for informational purposes and should not be used as a replacement for proper medical care and assessment. And even if patients are convinced that they need treatment for a specific illness based on the report, a doctor would still need to prescribe and approve of any procedures. I would be hard-pressed to consider the PGS kit as a true medical device, as the FDA contends.
For me, the 23andMe report has simply provided a road map for areas that I may want to get checked out in the future as I manage my health. And it’s given me an interesting dinner party conversation regarding my ancestral heritage: part South Asian, part East Asian, part Celtic Briton and part Ashkenazi Jew. Not bad for $99.
Modern Farmer recently came across a fascinating book called The Psychology of Birds. Written by shrink-turned-birdwatcher Harold Burtt, the book applies the powers of psychoanalysis to our inscrutable feathered friends, e.g., "There's no point in asking a bluejay why he is screaming."
But, in a major scholastic oversight, Burtt forgot the turkey.
We’d like to pick up where the book left off. After all, Americans wolf down 46 million of these birds each November; shouldn’t we at least try to relate? Using the combined wisdom of an Ohio turkey farmer named Bill Karcher, a poultry researcher named John Anderson and some 4H essays written for children, let us provide you with some armchair insight into tomorrow’s dinner.
Loneliness
It’s well-documented: Domesticated turkeys always want to hang out. Even if they have lots of space to roam, they’ll stick tight; Anderson calls it “flocking up.†Remove a turkey from his friends, he’ll squawk and make a scene. They’re not real choosy â€" Anderson has seen turkeys latch onto dogs or sheep in a pinch. He even has a turkey at home that trails him like a trained pooch.
Fear of Death
In the poultry industry, stories make the rounds about turkeys suffering heart attacks when their brethren head to slaughter. True or not, Karcher says that when a turkey dies in front of his flock, everyone else gets spooked. They all mope for awhile, eating less and avoiding the death site. Luckily they get over it after a few days. “They’re either really resilient, or they’ve got bad short-term memory,†Karcher says.
Growing Pains
Right around the age of adolescence, male turkeys start acting like punks. They seek attention in the most desperate ways, shoving each other around and generally being obnoxious. “It’s like teen humans,†says Karcher. “They don’t have the good judgment that comes with maturity.â€
Motherly Love
Turkey hens are like most mothers in nature â€" mess with their babies and they’ll totally freak. Karcher says it can be no easy task to collect eggs during laying season. Typically docile hens have no problem rearing up and attacking a human. He says the male turkeys (toms) will also get in on the action. “You take an egg, they’re going to flog the crap out of you with their wings,†he says.
A Need to Be Heard
Do not mock the comical-sounding gobble â€" it’s a basic form of self-expression. It’s also only one of the noises turkeys make in a fairly complex arsenal of turkey communication. Turkeys possess a vast range of gobbles, clucks and yelps, with meanings ranging from “I’ll take you on, big boy†(Acker’s words) to “I’m lost†orâ€I’m just waking up for the day.â€
A Tidy Mind
You’ve surely heard this one before â€" in a rainstorm, turkeys will supposedly crane their necks up and drown. This myth has been roundly disproven, yet it endures. Some claim it is the necessary folklore we use to justify mass turkey slaughter (i.e., it’s okay to kill dumb things). Dr. Karl Nestor suggests that turkeys aren’t dumb, but they do like a good rainstorm. It’s like a natural shower â€" Nestor says they want the rain to wash them clean. He may just be speculating, but turkeys are always preening and tamping down their feathers, and a not-quite-OCD display of hygiene..
In the course of exploring their universe, mathematicians have occasionally stumbled across holes: statements that can be neither proved nor refuted with the nine axioms, collectively called “ZFC,†that serve as the fundamental laws of mathematics. Most mathematicians simply ignore the holes, which lie in abstract realms with few practical or scientific ramifications. But for the stewards of math’s logical underpinnings, their presence raises concerns about the foundations of the entire enterprise.
“How can I stay in any field and continue to prove theorems if the fundamental notions I’m using are problematic?†asks Peter Koellner, a professor of philosophy at Harvard University who specializes in mathematical logic.
Chief among the holes is the continuum hypothesis, a 140-year-old statement about the possible sizes of infinity. As incomprehensible as it may seem, endlessness comes in many measures: For example, there are more points on the number line, collectively called the “continuum,†than there are counting numbers. Beyond the continuum lie larger infinities still â€" an interminable progression of evermore enormous, yet all endless, entities. The continuum hypothesis asserts that there is no infinity between the smallest kind â€" the set of counting numbers â€" and what it asserts is the second-smallest â€" the continuum. It “must be either true or false,†the mathematical logician Kurt Gödel wrote in 1947, “and its undecidability from the axioms as known today can only mean that these axioms do not contain a complete description of reality.â€
Infinity has ruffled feathers in mathematics almost since the field’s beginning.
The decades-long quest for a more complete axiomatic system, one that could settle the infinity question and plug many of the other holes in mathematics at the same time, has arrived at a crossroads. During a recent meeting at Harvard organized by Koellner, scholars largely agreed upon two main contenders for additions to ZFC: forcing axioms and the inner-model axiom “V=ultimate L.â€
“If forcing axioms are right, then the continuum hypothesis is false,†Koellner said. “And if the inner-model axiom is right, then the continuum hypothesis is true. You go through a whole list of issues in other fields, and the forcing axioms will answer those questions one way, and ultimate L will answer them a different way.â€
According to the researchers, choosing between the candidates boils down to a question about the purpose of logical axioms and the nature of mathematics itself. Are axioms supposed to be the grains of truth that yield the most pristine mathematical universe? In that case, V=ultimate L may be most promising. Or is the point to find the most fruitful seeds of mathematical discovery, a criterion that seems to favor forcing axioms? “The two sides have a somewhat divergent view of what the goal is,†said Justin Moore, a mathematics professor at Cornell University.
Axiomatic systems like ZFC provide rules governing collections of objects called “sets,†which serve as the building blocks of the mathematical universe. Just as ZFC now arbitrates mathematical truth, adding an extra axiom to the rule book would help shape the future of the field â€" particularly its take on infinity. But unlike most of the ZFC axioms, the new ones “are not self-evident, or at least not self-evident at this stage of our knowledge, so we have a much more difficult task,†said Stevo Todorcevic, a mathematician at the University of Toronto and the French National Center for Scientific Research in Paris.
Proponents of V=ultimate L say that establishing an absence of infinities between the integers and the continuum promises to bring order to the chaos of infinite sets, of which there are, unfathomably, an infinite variety. But the axiom may have minimal consequences for traditional branches of mathematics.
Courtesy of Hugh Woodin
Hugh Woodin, 58, is the leading proponent of an axiom called V=ultimate L that could help decide the fuller nature of infinity.
“Set theory is in the business of understanding infinity,†said Hugh Woodin, who is a mathematician at the University of California, Berkeley; the architect of V=ultimate L; and one of the most prominent living set theorists. The familiar numbers relevant to most mathematics, Woodin argues, “are an insignificant piece of the universe of sets.â€
Meanwhile, forcing axioms, which deem the continuum hypothesis false by adding a new size of infinity, would also extend the frontiers of mathematics in other directions. They are workhorses that regular mathematicians “can actually go out and use in the field, so to speak,†Moore said. “To me, this is ultimately what foundations [of mathematics] should be doing.â€
New advances in the study of V=ultimate L and newfound uses of forcing axioms, especially one called “Martin’s maximum†after the mathematician Donald Martin, have energized the debate about which axiom to adopt. And there’s a third point of view that disagrees with the debate’s very premise. According to some theorists, there are myriad mathematical universes, some in which the continuum hypothesis is true and others in which it is false â€" but all equally worth exploring. Meanwhile, “there are some skeptics,†Koellner said, “people who for philosophical reasons think set theory and the higher infinite doesn’t even make any sense.â€
Infinite Paradoxes
Infinity has ruffled feathers in mathematics almost since the field’s beginning. The controversy arises not from the notion of potential infinity â€"the number line’s promise of continuing forever â€" but from the concept of infinity as an actual, complete, manipulable object.
“What truly infinite objects exist in the real world?†asks Stephen Simpson, a mathematician and logician at Pennsylvania State University. Taking a view originally espoused by Aristotle, Simpson argues that actual infinity doesn’t really exist and so it should not so readily be assumed to exist in the mathematical universe. He leads an effort to wean mathematics off actual infinity, by showing that the vast majority of theorems can be proved using only the notion of potential infinity. “But potential infinity is almost forgotten now,†Simpson said. “In the ZFC set theory mindset, people tend not to even remember that distinction. They just think infinity means actual infinity and that’s all there is to it.â€
Georg Cantor, shown here circa 1870, proved that infinite sets come in different sizes. Many of his contemporaries despised his work, but it had a prevailing influence on mathematics.
Infinity was boxed and sold to the mathematical community in the late 19th century by the German mathematician Georg Cantor. Cantor invented a branch of mathematics dealing with sets â€" collections of elements that ranged from empty (the equivalent of the number zero) to infinite. His “set theory†was such a useful language for describing mathematical objects that within decades, it became the field’s lingua franca. A nine-item list of rules called Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory with the axiom of choice, or ZFC, was established and widely adopted by the 1920s. Translated into plain English, one of the axioms says two sets are equal if they contain the same elements. Another simply asserts that infinite sets exist.
Assuming actual infinity leads to unsettling consequences. Cantor proved, for instance, that the infinite set of even numbers {2,4,6,…} could be put in a “one-to-one correspondence†with all counting numbers {1,2,3,…}, indicating that there are just as many evens as there are odds-and-evens.
More shocking was his proving in 1873 that the continuum of real numbers (such as 0.00001, 2.568023489, pi and so on) is “uncountableâ€: Real numbers do not correspond in a one-to-one fashion with the counting numbers because for any numbered list of them, it is always possible to come up with a real number that isn’t on the list. The infinite sets of real numbers and counting numbers have different sizes, or in Cantor’s parlance, different “cardinal numbers.†In fact, he found that there are not two but an infinite sequence of ever-larger cardinals, each new infinity consisting of the power set, or set of all subsets, of the infinite set before it.
Some mathematicians despised this mess of infinities. One of Cantor’s colleagues called them a “grave diseaseâ€; another called him a “corruptor of youth.†But by the logic of set theory, it was true.
Cantor wondered about the two smallest cardinals. “It’s in some sense the most fundamental question you can ask,†Woodin said. “Is there an infinity in between, or is the infinity of the real numbers the first infinity past the infinity of the counting numbers?â€
All the obvious candidates for a mid-size infinity fail. Rational numbers (ratios of integers such as ½) are countable and thus have the same cardinality as the counting numbers. And there are just as many real numbers in any slice of the continuum (such as between 0 and 1) as there are in the whole set. Cantor guessed that there was no infinity in between countable sets and the continuum. But he couldn’t prove this “continuum hypothesis†using the axioms of set theory. Nor could anyone else.
Because each point on the interval (0, 1) corresponds to the point on (0, 2) that lies on the same red line, there are just as many real numbers between 0 and 1 as there are between 0 and 2. This “one-to-one correspondence†proves both infinite sets are the same size.
Then, in 1931, Gödel, who had recently finished his doctorate at the University of Vienna, made an astounding discovery. With a pair of proofs, the 25-year-old Gödel showed that a specifiable yet sufficiently complex axiomatic system like ZFC could never be both consistent and complete. Proving that its axioms are consistent (that is, that they don’t lead to contradictions) requires an additional axiom not on the list. And to prove that ZFC-plus-that-axiom is consistent, yet another axiom is needed. “Gödel’s incompleteness theorems told us we are never going to be able to catch our own tail,†Moore said.
The incompleteness of ZFC means that the mathematical universe that its axioms generate will inevitably have holes. “There will be [statements] that cannot be decided by those principles,†Woodin said. It soon became clear that the continuum hypothesis, “the most fundamental question you can ask†about infinity, was such a hole. Gödel himself proved that the truth of the continuum hypothesis is consistent with ZFC, and Paul Cohen, an American mathematician, proved the opposite, that the negation of the hypothesis is also consistent with ZFC. Their combined results demonstrated that the continuum hypothesis is actually independent of the axioms. Something beyond ZFC is needed to prove or refute it.
With the hypothesis unresolved, many other properties of cardinal numbers and infinity remain uncertain too. To set theory skeptics like Solomon Feferman, a professor emeritus of mathematics and philosophy at Stanford University, this doesn’t matter. “They’re simply not relevant to everyday mathematics,†Feferman said.
But to those who spend their days wandering in the universe of sets known as “V,†where almost everything is infinite, the questions loom large. “We don’t have a clear vision of the universe of sets,†Woodin said. “Almost any question you write down about sets is unsolvable. It’s not a satisfactory situation.â€
Universe of Sets
Gödel and Cohen, whose combined work led to the current crossroads in set theory, happen to be the founders of the two schools of thought about where to go from here.
Gödel conceived of a small and constructible model universe called “L,†populated by starting with the empty set and iterating it to build bigger and bigger sets. In the universe of sets that results, the continuum hypothesis is true: There is no infinite set between that of the integers and the continuum. “Unlike the chaos of the universe of sets, you can really analyze L,†Woodin said. This makes the axiom “V=L,†or the statement that the universe of sets V is equal to the “inner model†L, appealing. According to Woodin, there’s only one problem: “It severely limits the nature of infinity.â€
L is too small to encompass “large cardinals,†infinite sets that ascend in a never-ending hierarchy, with levels named “inaccessible,†“measurable,†“Woodin,†“supercompact,†“huge†and so on, altogether composing a cacophonous symphony of infinities. Discovered periodically over the 20th century, these large cardinals cannot be proved to exist with ZFC and instead must be posited with additional “large cardinal axioms.†But over the decades, they have been shown to generate rich and interesting mathematics. “As you climb up the large cardinal hierarchy, you get more and more significant consequences,†Koellner said.
As many of the mathematicians pointed out, the debate itself reveals a lack of human intuition regarding the concept of infinity.
To keep this symphony of infinities, set theorists have striven for decades to find an inner model that is as pristine and analyzable as L but incorporates large cardinals. However, constructing a universe of sets that included each type of large cardinal required a unique tool kit. For each larger, more inclusive inner model, “you had to do something completely different,†Koellner said. “Since the large cardinal hierarchy just goes on and on forever, it looked like we had to go on and on forever too, building as many new inner models as there are transition points in the large cardinal hierarchy. And that kind of makes it look hopeless because, you know, life is short.â€
Because there was no largest large cardinal, it seemed like there could be no ultimate L, an inner model that encompassed them all. “Then something very surprising happened,†Woodin said. In work that was published in 2010, he discovered a breakaway point in the hierarchy.
“Woodin showed that if you can just reach the level of the supercompacts, then there’s an overflow and your inner model picks up all the bigger large cardinals as well,†Koellner explained. “That was a sort of landscape shift. It provided this new hope that this approach can work. All you have to do is hit one supercompact and then you’ve got it all.â€
Although it has not yet been constructed, ultimate L is the name for the hypothetical inner model that includes supercompacts and therefore all large cardinals. The axiom V=ultimate L asserts that this inner model is the universe of sets.
Woodin, who is moving from Berkeley to Harvard in January, recently completed the first part of a four-stage proof of the ultimate L conjecture and is now vetting it with a small group of colleagues. He says he is “very optimistic about stage two†of the proof and hopes to finish it by next summer. “It all comes down to this conjecture, and if one can prove it, one proves the existence of ultimate L and verifies it is compatible with all notions of infinity, not only that we have thought of today but that we could ever think of,†he said. “If the ultimate L conjecture is true, then there’s an absolutely compelling case that V is ultimate L.â€
Expanding the Universe
Even if ultimate L exists, can be constructed and is every bit as glorious as Woodin hopes, it isn’t everyone’s ideal universe. “There’s a contrary impulse running through much of set-theoretic history that tells us the universe should be as rich as possible, not as small as possible,†said Penelope Maddy, a philosopher of mathematics at the University of California, Irvine and the author of “Defending the Axioms,†published in 2011. “And that’s what motivates the forcing axioms.â€
To expand ZFC, address the continuum hypothesis and better understand infinity, advocates of forcing axioms put stock in a method called forcing, originally conceived of by Cohen. If inner models build a universe of sets from the ground up, forcing expands it outward in all directions.
Todorcevic, one of the method’s leading specialists, compares forcing to the invention of complex numbers, which are real numbers with an extra dimension. But instead of starting with real numbers, “you are starting with the universe of sets, and then you extend it to form a new, bigger universe,†he said. In the extended universe created by forcing, there is a larger class of real numbers than in the original universe defined by ZFC. This means the real numbers of ZFC constitute a smaller infinite set than the full continuum. “In this way, you falsify the continuum hypothesis,†Todorcevic said.
A forcing axiom called “Martin’s maximum,†discovered in the 1980s, extends the universe as far as it can go. It is the most powerful rival for V=ultimate L, albeit much less beautiful. “From a philosophical point, it is much harder to justify this axiom,†Todorcevic said. “It could only be justified in terms of the influence it has on the rest of mathematics.â€
George M. Bergman, Berkeley
Stevo Todorcevic has helped show that forcing axioms bestow many mathematical structures with user-friendly properties.
This is where forcing axioms shine. While V=ultimate L is busy building a castle of unimaginable infinities, forcing axioms fill some problematic potholes in everyday mathematics. Work over the past few years by Todorcevic, Moore, Carlos Martinez-Ranero and others shows that they bestow many mathematical structures with nice properties that make them easier to use and understand.
To Moore, these sorts of results give forcing axioms the advantage over inner models. “Ultimately, the decision has to be grounded in: ‘What does it do for mathematics?’ †he said. “Aside from its own intrinsic interest, what good mathematics does it produce?â€
“My response would be, it’s certainly true that Martin’s maximum is great for understanding structures in classical mathematics,†Woodin said. “That’s not what set theory is about, to me. It’s not clear how Martin’s maximum is going to lead to a better understanding of infinity.â€
At the recent Harvard meeting, researchers from both camps presented new work on inner models and forcing axioms and discussed their relative merits. The back-and-forth will likely continue, they said, until one or the other candidate falls by the wayside. Ultimate L could turn out not to exist, for example. Or perhaps Martin’s maximum isn’t as beneficial as its proponents hope.
As many of the mathematicians pointed out, the debate itself reveals a lack of human intuition regarding the concept of infinity. “Until you further investigate the consequences of the continuum hypothesis, you don’t have any real intuition as to whether it’s true or false,†Moore said.
Mathematics has a reputation for objectivity. But without real-world infinite objects upon which to base abstractions, mathematical truth becomes, to some extent, a matter of opinion â€" which is Simpson’s argument for keeping actual infinity out of mathematics altogether. The choice between V=ultimate L and Martin’s maximum is perhaps less of a true-false problem and more like asking which is lovelier, an English garden or a forest?
“It’s a personal thing,†Moore said.
However, the field of mathematics is known for its unity and cohesion. Just as ZFC came to dominate alternative foundational frameworks in the early 20th century, firmly embedding actual infinity in mathematical thinking and practice, it is likely that only one new axiom to decide the fuller nature of infinity will survive. According to Koellner, “one side is going to have to be wrong.â€
As a devout user of physical QWERTY keyboards, I'm pretty sure I'm screwed.
My two-year contract expires in just three more months, but I don't know if my phone will make it. I touch-type all my interviews into my Droid, but it’s simply not reliable anymore. There isn't a day that goes by without some app experiencing crippling slowdown. The phone just can't seem to hold a charge. And it's not like I can just go out and upgrade, even if I had the cash: there isn't a single desirable smartphone with a physical QWERTY keyboard on the horizon. Over the last few months, Motorola announced the Moto X, the Droid Ultra, the Droid Maxx, and the Droid Mini, but there was no Droid 5 to be had.
Isn't it strange how all the high-end smartphones with keyboards have up and disappeared?
Recently, I met Doug Kaufman, manager of handset strategy for Sprint. He had a story to share.
The QWERTY champion
"For years, I've been the QWERTY champion within Sprint," Kaufman began.
"Sprint's had one of the largest bases of QWERTY going back to the whole messaging phenomenon ... at one point we were selling 40-percent messaging phones," he explained right off the bat.
When Android came along and smartphones truly began to take off, handsets with QWERTY keyboards did very well for Sprint. The Samsung Moment, the EVO Shift, the Epic 4G: "We sold multimillions of those," said Kaufman.
All the research told Sprint that it was on the right track, that physical keyboards were a differentiator that would help the carrier sell phones. When Sprint conducted surveys, it found that 70 to 80 percent of respondents with side-sliding physical QWERTY keyboards reported that it was easy to type words and letters. By contrast, touchscreen-only devices typically polled under 50 percent.
"The best [touch-only device] we ever had was the Galaxy Note II," said Kaufman, on which 54 percent of respondents said typing was easy. "The iPhone 5 was around 48 percent, just to give you a sense."
And for a time, it seemed like that typing experience would actually drive future purchases. When Sprint asked customers whether they'd buy a physical keyboard the next time around â€" not so long ago â€" 75 percent of existing QWERTY users said they would. Even one quarter of iPhone users, and 30 percent of Galaxy Note II users, said they'd prefer a physical QWERTY keyboard on their next smartphone.
"So we had all that data, and we said 'Look, there's still the demand for QWERTY.' And then we went out and built the LG Mach and the Photon Q."
"It was a big party and nobody came." So much for surveys.
What happened? People started buying phones they could recognize, according to Kaufman. He believes the reason that QWERTY phones stopped selling has little to do with large screens and everything to do with a trend towards "iconic" handsets: flagship devices which boast fancy designs and giant advertising campaigns.
"At the end of the day, what happened is two things. Half of your customers buy the iPhone. All those people who said, "Oh, I'm going to buy QWERTY," boom, take them out of the equation."
"And then as you probably know, the market has moved to everyone buying iconic phones... people see the advertising, they walk in, they want to buy a Galaxy S III," says Kaufman. "Or an HTC One," he adds suddenly.
One and done
It's ironic that Kaufman would mention HTC. The Taiwanese company built a good part of its reputation on QWERTY handsets â€" before it decided to put all its eggs into one iconic basket. After years of manufacturing tiny Windows Mobile typing machines, HTC built the very first Android smartphone, the T-Mobile G1. If a cellular carrier needed a QWERTY phone to offer their customers, HTC was all too happy to provide, manufacturing devices like the Evo Shift 4G, the G2, and T-Mobile’s entire myTouch line.
But in 2012, HTC decided to focus on just "one" smartphone at a time. The HTC One series was the company’s attempt to make its products a little more iconic, a little more like Samsung's successful Galaxy line. The announcement came with bad news for keyboard fans, though: HTC designer Claude Zellweger explained that the firm was moving away from QWERTY as a whole.
"We have texting, emoticons, voice-to-text and other such methods of communication that have abbreviated our exchanges."
Why did HTC abandon the physical keyboard? Certainly, design played a role. HTC design director Jonah Becker tells me that sliding QWERTY devices like my Droid are typically "significantly thicker" and harder to slip into a pocket, and that "the moving parts result in a phone that doesn't feel as solid as a monolithic bar-type phone."
But surprisingly, Becker tells me that the physical construction wasn't the primary justification: "The real reason is not design, but the changes in behavior." He explains how far virtual keyboards have come, how children are growing up with touchscreens, and how written communication has become less critical for the smartphone audience. If a picture tells a thousand words, how many can you convey with a Vine or a YouTube clip?
"We have texting, emoticons, voice-to-text and other such methods of communication that have abbreviated our exchanges. This all makes a physical QWERTY less important," says Becker.
Motorola, the manufacturer of my Droid 4, agrees. "There became this interesting tension where people wanted to see information, but they didn't need input as much," Motorola SVP Rick Osterloh tells me.
A forced choice?
I wasn't totally buying that the world abandoned the idea of physical keyboards overnight. It seemed more likely to me that the cellular industry never gave them a choice.
For the past several years, buying a smartphone with a QWERTY keyboard has meant settling for less than the latest and greatest technology on the market. When my Droid 4 launched in February 2012, it had already been completely outspecced and outclassed by devices with better screens. Arguably, there hasn't been a top-tier smartphone with a physical keyboard since the Samsung Epic 4G set a new high bar for Android devices in August, 2010. The carriers had decided to treat QWERTY sliders as messaging phones for teens rather than tools of the elite, and adjusted their asks and advertising respectively.
Who killed the QWERTY keyboard? The usual suspect is the HD screen. Visual real estate has become a focal point for the industry. And yet, as screens got wider, they became harder to hold, so manufacturers made them thinner to compensate. Thin and wide became the goal, and then the norm. "We used to want a TV for these types of experiences, but now we expect a cinematic experience on a phone," says HTC's Becker.
Who killed the QWERTY keyboard? The usual suspect is the HD screen
And that's where you run into trouble with physical keyboards, according to Motorola's Rick Osterloh. Keyboards "make it so you have to cut the screen size down, or have a slider form factor which adds a considerable amount of cost, thickness, and weight to the product."
"There's really no getting around that because it's another mechanical part ... it ends up being fundamentally thicker by just a few millimeters," he tells me.
Still, all of this assumes that smartphone buyers would actually rather have a top-tier smartphone with a large HD screen instead of a top-tier smartphone with a smaller screen and a keyboard. In the past couple of years, that's never even been an option.
The niche market
But what if it were? Would manufacturers and carriers consider building an iconic phone with top-of-the-line specs, a nice HD screen, and a physical QWERTY keyboard that slides out from underneath?
Even Sprint's QWERTY champion Doug Kaufman doesn't think that's likely to happen. "I think there would be a segment out there that would buy it, but it's getting smaller every day ... [the OEMs] want a thin, sexy device to put on advertising," he explains. "I think the ship has really sailed on QWERTY."
For their part, HTC and Motorola say the keyboard is simply not that important. "I use the HTC One now, and can't imagine going back to a physical keyboard," says Becker, adding that HTC has to stay focused to achieve its design aims. "I don't think there are roadblocks preventing us from building a QWERTY phone at any price point. It's that the behaviors and technologies have made them less of a priority," he explains. "The combination of [voice dictation and predictive software keyboards] reduces the imperative to have a physical keyboard for a consumer," says Motorola's Rick Osterloh.
Is the QWERTY so incredibly niche that manufacturers are willing to let BlackBerry have that market unchallenged? One anonymous industry insider hints that BlackBerry's misfortunes might actually be part of the problem. "Believe me, this is a game of volume... if they thought [QWERTY] would be a meaningful niche, it would not go ignored. We saw what happened to the manufacturer who thought different."
Still, when I push Sprint's Kaufman just a little bit further, he relents. "It'd need to be an HTC One Q, a Galaxy S4 Q... [a flagship phone] with top-of-the-line specs."
"If you could have a Galaxy S4 with a QWERTY, I think people would buy that."
If any company were to try QWERTY again, Samsung would seem to be the most likely candidate. Though some have accused the Korean manufacturer of copying competitors, the company has also shown that it's willing to go to substantial lengths to make its smartphones appear bigger and bolder than the competition. It was Samsung that pushed screen sizes to a crazy 6.3 inches, and Samsung who successfully brought the stylus back from the dead. Now that the company already has a screen size for every pocket and purse, perhaps the company could use its marketing prowess to push the physical keyboard once more.
Each year, the McRib makes a brief visit to Earth. Its arrival elicits reactions ranging from horror to awe. And for good reason: this would-be rib sandwich is really a restructured pork patty pressed into the rough shape of a slab of ribs, its slathering of barbecue sauce acting as camouflage as much as coating.
“Pork†is a generous term, since the McRib has traditionally been fashioned from otherwise unmarketable pig parts like tripe, heart, and stomach, material that is not only cheap but also easier to mold and bind into a coherent, predetermined shape. McDonald’s accurately lists the patty’s primary ingredient as “boneless pork,†although even that’s a fairly strong euphemism. Presumably few of the restaurant’s patrons would line up for a Pressed McTripe.
Despite its abhorrence, the McRib bears remarkable similarity to another, more widely accepted McDonald’s product, the Chicken McNugget. In fact, the McRib was first introduced in 1982, shortly after the company had designed the McNugget. Chicken McNuggets are fashioned by the same method as is the McRib, namely by grinding factory-farmed chicken meat into a mash and then reconstituting them into a preservative-stabilized solid, aka a “nugget.†And both products are bound and preserved by a petrochemical preservative called tertiary butylhydroquinone, or TBHQ. According to the Consumer’s Dictionary of Food Additives, one gram of TBHQ can cause “nausea, vomiting, ringing in the ears, delirium, a sense of suffocation, and collapse.†In a 2003 lawsuit accusing McDonald’s of consumer deception, federal district court judge Robert W. Sweet called Chicken McNuggets a “McFrankenstein creation.â€
But despite rejoinders like that of Judge Sweet, the Chicken McNugget flies under the radar, hiding its falseness, while the McRib flaunts it. In part, this is because the concept of a Chicken McNugget corresponds with a possible natural configuration of ordinary poultry, whose meat could be cut into chunks, battered, and fried. By contrast, there is no world in which pork spare ribs could be eaten straight through, even after having been slow cooked such that some of the cartilage breaks down. It’s a partial explanation for the horror and the delight wrought by McRib, but not a sufficient one.
* * *
Sometimes the things we believe aren’t out there in plain view, but hidden away inside. The French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan gives the name objet a to the thing that elicits desire. In French the phrase means “object other†(the a stands for autre). For Lacan, our behaviors themselves may be knowable, but the causes of those behaviors aren’t always so. Objet a is not the object of desire (the thing we desire), but the thing that causes the desire to come into being (the cause of a desire for that thing). The philosopher Slavoj Žižek sometimes calls objet a the stain or defect in the world that motivates a belief or action.
Psychoanalysis focuses on the operation of the unconscious, the motivations that make us think, believe, and act without us being aware of them. As such, we can’t see those causes directly, we can’t unearth them and hold them in our hands. This is one of the main differences between psychoanalysis and modern psychiatry and neuroscience. The psychoanalyst contends that our rationales are not reducible to their symptoms (for matching to pharmaceuticals) or their measurements (for matching to known neurological patterns).
The causes of our desires can’t be seen directly, but must be looked at from a distorted perspective. Žižek calls it a “parallax gap,†a break in perspective separating two things that cannot be synthesized. Here’s how he puts it: “the object-cause of desire is something that, when viewed frontally, is nothing at all, just a voidâ€"it acquires the contours of something only when viewed sideways.â€
Hans Holbein, The Ambassadors (1553)
In the history of art, the most famous example of “looking awry†at an image to see what only appears as a void from the front is Hans Holbein’s 1553 painting The Ambassadors. When viewed straight-on, its clear that something is amiss in the foreground near the ambassadors’ feet. But only when the picture is viewed askew, from a different perspective, does the “stain†reveal itself: a skull, symbolizing death, thus betraying the vanity of the vestments and ornaments of the painting’s aristocrats. Even though we see skull in the painting, we don’t really see it for what it is until we look at it differently, until we view it sideways.
The McRib is like Holbein’s skull: we experience it as (quasi-)foodstuff, as marketing campaign, as cult object, as Internet meme, but those experiences don’t sufficiently explain it. To understand McRib fully, we have to look at the sandwich askew.
When McDonald’s first “retired†the McRib in 2005, it marketed the event as the “McRib Farewell Tour.†The promotion included websites with a mock-petition to save the sandwich, sponsored by the fictitious “Boneless Pig Farmers Association of America.†The same farewell tour appeared again in 2006, and yet again in 2007. Since then, the sandwich has reappeared for a few weeks in the autumn, a predictable part of the holiday season.
Together, the eternal return of the McRib, along with the blatant celebration of a sandwich that is obviously and unabashedly fake comprise the cause of desire the public bears for McDonald’s. Not just for the McRib, mind you, but for all of the restaurant’s offeringsâ€"most of which rely on the same cheap ingredients, machined pre-preparation, and chemical additives that the McRib embodies to the point of caricature.
We know that we do not know the composition of the McNugget or McRib or McWhatever, but we do not know precisely what it is that we do not know. Nevertheless, we desire such products not in spite of the fact that we do not know it, but because we don’t. This apparent paradox rests at the very heart of McDonald’s cookery: the secret components and methods that make it possible to create cheap and predictable, sweet and fat fast food. We normally don’t talk about it, but the chemical composition, mass-manufacture, and freezer-to-tray reconstitution of fast food isn’t just a convenient means to produce a result people enjoy. Instead, that very manufactured falseness is itself what we desire, in food as much as in smartphonesâ€"what is high-tech if not designed fakery?
In fact, manufactured, technological falseness has become a feature of haute cuisine as much as fast food. As Jeb Boniakowski has argued, apart from context, cost, and class markers, there’s really not much difference between McDonald’s “super-processed†food and molecular gastronomy, the application of food science to haute cuisine.
If you put a Cheeto on a big white plate in a formal restaurant and serve it with chopsticks and say something like “It is a cornmeal quenelle, extruded at a high speed, and so the extrusion heats the cornmeal ‘polenta’ and flash-cooks it, trapping air and giving it a crispy texture with a striking lightness. It is then dusted with an ‘umami powder’ glutamate and evaporated-dairy-solids blend.†People would go just nuts for that.
This year, the McRib’s fate remains elusive; no official announcement has emerged from the proverbial pressed pig plantation. Still, dutiful citizens in scattered locations across the U.S. have already reported sightings of the sandwich, indicating the porcine stampede has begun.Â
* * *
The McRib’s stochastic return makes visible the relationship between the eater and the McDonald’s menu. It produces a stain, a tear in the order of things that reveals the object-cause of desire for McDonald’s, but only briefly before it evaporates like faux-cartilage. The fragile conditions that make the McRib possible also insure that desire for McDonald’s food more generally speaking is maintained.
Desire is a delicate system. For Lacan, the lover “gives what he does not possess,†namely the objet a that incites desire rather than sustaining it. Likewise, McDonald’s sells what it does not sell: the conditions of predictability, affordability, and chemico-machinic automated cookery that make its very business viable. When we eat at McDonald’s we don’t eat its foodâ€"Quarter Pounders or Big Macs or what have youâ€"so much as we consume the mechanical predictability of its overall offering. Chicken McNuggets are the same everywhere. The same shape, the same taste, the same packaging, the same menu, the same uniforms, the same roofline, the same signage. Industrialism is also a kind of magic, the magic of the perfect facsimile. Eating at McDonald’sâ€"eating anything whatsoever at McDonald’sâ€"connects us to that magic, allows us to marinate inside it and take on its power.
We might be conditioned to feel ashamed of this desire, to regret or lament wanting to eat at McDonald’s because its shapes and smells and packages are so familiar. But why? We dine at temples of molecular gastronomy like El Bulli or Alinea partly (perhaps largely) for the experience of being shown an experience, of partaking in the concepts, in the presentation of aromas disperses with dry ice vapor or oils flavored with steelhead roe. Eating isn’t an afterthought, but it isn’t the whole story either.
McDonald’s knows itself and its customers well enough to realize that it must peel back the curtain occasionally, to show the real cause of desire for its products rather than to coat them in duplicitous marketing about freshness and wholesomeness. It’s necessary to insure that the indirect expression of the desire for its wares take the form of a surprise that clashes with our expectations of what to expect from McDonald’s food. One doesn’t even have to eat a McRib to be subject to it, since mass- and now social media perform the work for us. One can unironically post a Facebook update asking “Where’s my McRib?†or drive a little out of the way to pass the McDonald’s in the hopes of glimpsing the distinctive “McRib is Back†signage. Even if you’d never eat a McRib, it’s important to know when it returns, to remind yourself that industrialized, preserved foods are both a miracle and a calamity.
Lacan gave the name “symptom†to the process by which psychoanalytic subjects take part in their unconscious desires. Couldn’t one of Žižek’s famous refrains about the concept, “Enjoy your Symptom,†easily pass as a McDonald’s slogan? The strange, even upsetting relationship between McDonald’s and its customers is not so different from the analyst’s talking cure, which helps the patient see the symptom in order to allow it to be recognized and thereby to disappear. The McRib’s existence injects a measure of otherwise unrealizable gratification into the social fabric of food culture, like the McRib’s sauce covers reconstituted pork to make it palatable. Normally, psychoanalysis is meant to reveal a desire in order to satisfy it. But in the case of McRib, that satisfaction must be temporary, occasional, such that it can return again the next year. A good thing, too because who could bear it every day?
Yet, the McRib’s perversity is not a defect, but a feature. The purpose of the McRib is to make the McNugget seem normal.
On May 7 of this year, I received a Facebook message from a woman named Stephanie Lee:
Hey Mark, I found that I have colon cancer today. I go for surgery Thursday morning. Please keep me in your prayers.
At the time, Stephanie was thirty-six and lived on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi, in the town of Ocean Springs. I had met her eight years before, when I worked with Tom Junod on a story for Esquire ("Mississippi Goddamn," November 2005) about how Hurricane Katrina had affected military families already enduring the calamities of the war in Iraq—the families whose suffering had been doubled by the wind and the rain and the floods. Junod and I met Stephanie at her grandmother's house in Lucedale, Mississippi, where she told her story. She was a small woman who worked as a pipe fitter at the Northrop Grumman shipyard, a fine-boned beauty with an intimidating reserve of tensile strength, a single mother whose face settled easily into stoicism and whose eyes lit up with challenge and dare. She'd spent most of her life bedeviled by inconstant men until she met Terrance Lee where she worked. He was a welder. He was younger than Stephanie, and quiet, but she thought he was like her in that he had a plan for making something of himself. Like her, he'd joined the Mississippi National Guard. They married and she e-mailed with him every night after he was called to Iraq in January 2005. She was seven months pregnant when his Humvee went over an IED. She was nine months pregnant when Katrina ravaged the Gulf Coast, and she got in her truck with her husband's .45 and drove nearly eight hours on snarled roads to Shreveport to find a generator so that her baby—Terrance's baby—wouldn't have to be born in darkness. Three days later, she gave birth to Marchelle, who never stopped reminding Stephanie both of her life with Terrance and of the impossibility of life without him.
Adam AmengualStephanie Lee, 36, Mississippi, 2013Widowed by war at 28, she was told she had terminal cancer earlier this year.A few years after her story ran in the magazine, I was surprised to receive a Facebook message from Stephanie that read, Remember me? Over a couple years we swapped the casual and fitful messages typical of Facebook. Then came her message of May 7.
A week later came another. I am well. The surgery went great, just waiting for the biopsy to find out if the cancer spread to my lymphoid. I'm sore and tired and feel so helpless right now, but I know it will get better.
A week after that: I have to have chemo, Mark. Keep me in your prayers.
>> AND STEPHANIE'S FUND: PLEASE DONATE HERE Stephanie was not alone. She had her seventeen-year-old daughter, Kamri, a student at the local high school, and she had Marchelle. She had friends and an aunt with whom she was close. Thanks to Terrance, she also had health insurance. Thanks to Terrance, she was able to walk into the Keesler Air Force Base Medical Center in Biloxi and receive treatment for a cost no greater than the utterance of a number. It was the last four digits of Terrance's Social Security number, and now it was her number, for her war. She had stage-three colon cancer. Following the surgery to remove the tumor from her colon, her oncologist wanted to treat her as aggressively as possible—six months of a combination of toxic chemicals known as FOLFOX6, administered every two weeks through a port installed between her left breast and her collarbone. The port was implanted under her skin on June 10, a week before her chemotherapy was set to start. It was supposed to be minor surgery, but two days later Stephanie woke up in such agony that there was fear that perhaps the surgeon who had installed the port had accidentally perforated her chest wall. He hadn't, but the news was even worse. She went to Keesler for a CT scan, and after she was done, she was waiting in the ER and an attending physician walked into the room. She said, "You know it's in your liver, right?"
Just like that.
The doctor held her, and together they wept. But a part of her just wanted someone—her own doctor—to tell her what it meant, so she would know what she had to do. The next Monday, June 17, her oncologist, Major Owen Roberts, entered the treatment room where she was waiting to begin her chemotherapy. Kneeling beside her, he apologized for the way she found out that her cancer had metastasized. He assumed, he said, that the surgeon, having been the first to review the CT scan, had told her.
"Am I gonna die?" Stephanie asked.
"I can't answer that," Dr. Roberts said. He then proceeded to tell Stephanie that she no longer had stage-three colon cancer. She had stage four. She might have twenty-eight months to live if she could tolerate the chemotherapy, six months if she couldn't. She was terminal.
So she was alone, after all.
Mark, the cancer has spread to my liver.
"Am I gonna die?" Stephanie asked.
"I can't answer that," Dr. Roberts said. He then proceeded to tell Stephanie that she no longer had stage-three colon cancer. She had stage four. She was terminal.I had begun talking with Stephanie regularly, and I was on the phone with her the day she was told she was going to die. I could hear her smacking her palm on the countertop in her kitchen in Mississippi. "I will go back to school, I will finish my degree in supply-chain management," she said, her voice raised and defiant. "I will get a job and become a success in my profession—I am good, Mark!—I will remarry, I will see my girls grow to become women, I will be a grandmother to my grandbabies!"
And then she came to tears. "It's not fair! Marchelle can't lose both parents before she's ten. It's not fair! My God!"
Though he insists on change, Eric Schadt never changes. No matter the season, he still shows up at both work and most social functions in a uniform of white polo shirt and hiking shorts. He still drives fast enough to terrify his colleagues, though instead of going to work in California on a motorcycle at a hundred miles per hour, he now runs two miles to catch a train to New York City, where he then runs another mile and a half to his office. He is still squat and powerful, his imposingly lumpy brow a phrenologist's dream and his nose the size of a crab apple. He still smiles all the time and sounds like a self-amused surfer. He still writes almost as fast as he breathes and speaks in torrents of scientific jargon that bear only an approximate relation to the English language. He still has a unique capacity for both collaboration and pissing people off. He still gets into public arguments with men of settled eminence—two years ago, he took on James Watson—by telling them they're clinging to failed paradigms that he is trying to displace. When he's asked the difference between what they do and what he does, he still says, "the difference between medieval alchemy and chemistry."
Adam AmengualEric Schadt, 48, New York "That's exactly the kind of patient we take," Schadt said upon first hearing of Stephanie. "But it's a real long shot. I'd say one in a thousand."What has changed—what he has changed—is his situation and his surroundings. When he was profiled in Esquire two years ago ("Adventures in Extreme Science," April 2011), he was an outsider enduring a kind of prestigious exile. It suited him. He had grown up in a small town in Michigan. He was the child of Christian fundamentalists and for much of his life a fundamentalist himself who still believes, more or less, in intelligent design. When he graduated high school, he joined the Air Force with the idea of subjecting himself to the rigors of Special Forces training. Instead, he blew out his shoulder on a climb, and the Air Force tried to salvage its investment by putting him through a battery of tests. He took them; when the scores came back, he was asked by stunned superiors if math had always come easily to him. Then he was sent to college and undertook the task of complete intellectual self-transformation. He received an undergraduate degree in applied mathematics and computer science at Cal Poly and his master's in pure mathematics at UC Davis. Pure math was, to him, the Special Forces of the mind—he took it because it was so hard, and he wanted to find out just how smart he was. He was pretty smart, as it turned out, but he despaired of working on problems that existed on the level of pure abstraction and had no bearing on the problems of the world. It seemed like, well, a sin. He went to UCLA to get a Ph.D. in the emerging field of biomathematics. The one problem was that the degree required a Ph.D.-level mastery of molecular biology, and the last biology course he'd taken was in high school. So he taught himself by reading textbooks. It wasn't hard. Pure math was hard. Molecular biology, after pure math, struck him as ridiculously easy.
Schadt got a job at the pharmaceutical giant Merck and, availing himself of the Merck supercomputer, became one of the leading exponents of the medical use of what became known as Big Data. He also had amazing success coming up with new drugs for Merck, to the extent that at one point half the drugs in development started in Schadt's lab. Then he told Merck that they wouldn't work. What data had taught him was that the underlying faith of molecular biology—of all biology, since Watson and Crick had elucidated the structure of the DNA molecule—was false. Untold billions had been spent in the hope that we could understand disease one gene at a time, or one genetic pathway at a time; by targeting the gene or the pathway "for" Alzheimer's disease, say, we could target Alzheimer's disease itself. Schadt told Merck that this was a strategy doomed to fail, because disease arose not from single genes or pathways but rather out of vast networks of genes and pathways whose interactions could be understood only by supercomputers guided by abstruse algorithms. Evangelical still, though now evangelical on behalf of irreducible complexity, he asked Merck to remake itself in the image of the network model he was determined to pioneer. Merck declined and Schadt headed to Silicon Valley, to the land of data.
He wound up at a company that made advanced gene sequencers, Pacific Biosciences. There he tested his network model by resolving to become the "hub" of networks of collaborators. He did his supercomputing with Amazon; he put forth an idea of mapping pathogens in public places that attracted the attention of Google; he worked with researchers at Harvard to identify the strain of cholera ravaging Haiti and traced it to South Asian relief workers. But he still wanted what he wanted at Merck: the resources to prove he was either right or wrong. He thought he was going to get enough venture-capital money to start his own lab at UC San Francisco, but the problem with venture capitalists is that they don't want to give money—they want to make it. Schadt didn't want to make that kind of bet. He wanted someone to bet on him.
In the spring of 2011, he finally heard from a gambler. Well, not really—he heard from Mount Sinai, a century-and-a-half-old hospital and medical school on the East Side of Manhattan. He had always thought that he would stay on the West Coast, where, he says, "people are really good at making things." He had always looked askance at New York, where "they're only good at making money." But now, in hearing from Sinai, he was hearing from money itself. He was hearing, in particular, from a man who had done nothing but make money for the better part of his life, Carl Icahn. Sinai was an institution seeking to remake itself; Icahn was a man looking to put his name on a vision of the future. Schadt wound up meeting Icahn and afterward wrote in an e-mail, I think he liked that I had a rougher life growing up, where I guess he did as well. In July 2011, Schadt drove his family from Palo Alto to New York. In September, Mount Sinai announced that he would be head of the newly created Institute for Genomics and Multiscale Biology. A little more than a year later, Sinai announced that Schadt's operation would be renamed the Icahn Institute, just as the entire medical school would be renamed the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. For the privilege, Carl Icahn had given Eric Schadt $150 million to claim the future of biology.
In some ways, everything had changed, for Schadt now had four hundred people working for him, along with nine gene sequencers at his disposal and a supercomputer named Minerva in the basement. In other ways, however, he remained a guy in shorts, a guy whose face was always agleam in the light of his laptop, a guy whose office walls were decorated with a palimpsest of indecipherable equations. Most important, he remained a guy who never said no—who never rejected anything as impossible—and when he learned that a woman from Mississippi whom Esquire had written about eight years earlier had been told she had terminal colon cancer, Schadt looked up and said:
"That's exactly the kind of patient we take."
It was, in the end, the reason he had come to New York. He probably didn't really need nine gene sequencers. He probably didn't even really need Minerva, because he could do supercomputing with Google and Amazon. But as both a lapsed molecular biologist and a lapsed Christian looking to establish a new faith, he needed something he had never had before. He needed patients. He needed someone like Stephanie Lee.
A voyage into the strange underworld of spambots, shady marketing, and non-human intelligence.
Bots can be scary. This is not Olivia. (Shutterstock/mast3r)
It was around 5pm last Thursday when Olivia, a San Diego high school student, noticed that something interesting was going on with her Twitter account.Â
A swarm of 30 women with sexy profile pictures had just followed her on the social networking service. "guys wtf 30 PORNSTARS JUST FOLLOWED ME WHATS HAPPENING," she tweeted to her 600 or so followers.Â
Her friends started joking with her. One said: "I think they want you to join their profession."Â And it was a little funny. Weird, but funny. ("actually laughing so hard right now [emoji]," one friend tweeted at her.)
One minute she's doing homework and congratulating a friend on making varsity. The next, she's the center of the this swarm of porny weirdness. It was like the setup for a new Spielberg sci-fi movie.Â
Olivia posted screenshots from her account. She wrote in perhaps ironic all caps, "AM I PAYING FOR THIS" and "IS ANYONE ELSE AS CONCERNED AS I AM."Â
But... maybe being followed by pornstars would be the next trend at school? "why arent hundreds of porn stars following me," a friend tweeted.Â
Olivia started to notice some patterns, though. Each new follower was following precisely six people and almost everyone else the accounts were following were "verified" by Twitter. Many of the verified were legitimately famous people.
Seriously: what was going on?
Shantal Roddam (@Allieqtzm) was a typical example of one of her new followers. Shantal was a "Friendly beer fan" from Butte. She was following:
@ESPN, the world's leading sports brand; @MarsPhoenix, a long-dead robot on Mars; @ReutersScience, the news organization; @KingJames, Lebron James, the NBA star; @AlexisMadrigal, your faithful correspondent; and Olivia, a high school student in San Diego.
By 8:25pm, Olivia could announce, "I have hit 3,000 everyone 3,000 porn stars."Â
At 9:05, she crossed 4,000. At 9:51, she hit 5,000. She changed her Twitter bio to, "5,000 pornstars follow me and idk what to do." (idk means "I don't know" for the acronymically uninitiated.)
A boy tweeted, to no one in particular, that Olivia was "officially famous as fuck wtf." Another said, "Let's be honest we all knew that Olivia was going to be twitter famous from the start." A third said, "New game: take a shot every time someone follows Olivia."
All the new followers had names like "Earlene Timperman" and "Valerie Wienandt" and their bios were like Mad Libs for lame social media wannabes: "certified food nerd," "Hardcore social media scholar Bacon ninja," "Typical tv trailblazer Hardcore introvert," "Bacon specialist Certified organizer," "Friend of animals everywhere Coffee enthusiast," "Coffee advocate Hipster-friendly analyst."
Hardcore social media scholar Bacon ninja.
They all hailed from seemingly random cities: Fairmont, Danville, Trenton. Never a state. Never a country. Never a joke.
Oh, and none of them had actually tweeted anything.Â
* * *
Perhaps you have guessed what happened by now. These "people" were not people at all, but automatically generated accounts created by somebody with a bit of programming knowledge.
The thousands of new followers that Olivia got were spambots emanating from the same source.Â
Now, if you are reading this story on the Internet, you have probably encountered spambots, or at least the spam that such bots generate.Â
Generally speaking, the bots tend to follow really popular accounts. And they tend not to come in swarms of thousands but one or two at a time, maybe a few dozen at most.Â
So the mystery remained: why was a San Diego high schooler suddenly a spambot magnet?Â
I began to search through Olivia's followers looking for patterns.
The first thing I noticed: Olivia wasn't part of every bot in the swarm's follow list, but she was predominant. No other account that I could find had been targeted so often, not even Lebron James.Â
There is an underground economy in fake-account creation, as Newt Gingrich discovered when his campaign was accused of buying Twitter followers. What people are buying, of course, is not real people, but robot-generated accounts created to make it look like people are more famous than they are.
This kind of bot normally just picks accounts from Twitter's suggested user list, the Lebron Jameses and ESPNs. But perhaps someone had tried to up its sophistication by including something some regular users. Or maybe there was some sort of bug in its "Who should I follow?" code.Â
Other kinds of bots decide to follow people based on what they tweet, but looking at just a few examples, it was clear that there was no content connection between Olivia and the other people these bots were following.Â
The second thing I noticed: the spambots were following a lot of golf caddies. Â I couldn't explain that one immediately, but keep it in mind.
The third thing I noticed: Olivia wasn't the only San Diego high schooler. At least three other San Diego high schoolers, two of whom Olivia knows, were also targeted by the spambot. These kids, though, only got (at most) a few hundred spambot followers.
"Then there's the whole 'nerdy teenage boy creates botnet to impress a girl, follows others to cover his tracks' scenario. Poor kid who caddies at country club falls for rich girl whose family are members, pulls stunt to prove he's worthy..."
Which I, for one, loved as an explanation!
But then the bots started tweeting.Â
* * *
At first it was just one here or there, like the early kernels in a bag of popcorn.
Soon, most of them were tweeting. Not excessively, but a handful per bot. The messages weren't going out to the famous accounts, but to regular users across the world. They typically looked like this:
A typical bot-driven ad.
While the words in the tweet changed from person to person, each one tried to lead people to tweevip.com. (Don't go there.)
Tweevip's IP address suggests that the computer running the site is located in Roubaix, France, in the north, right near the Belgian border. The same Internet address also hosts these high-quality websites. Most seem set up to capture similar types of bot-generated traffic (for example vineluv, gramvip, which would seem to target Vine and Instagram).
Other spam sites you should avoid.
The point of Tweevip is to get you to enter your phone number and name. When you do, the site sends you a text message that says, "MOVIE EXTRAS WANTED! Make money in the movies. All looks, No Experience Required! To register call 1877-590-5505."Â
I called the number and confirmed with the representative on the phone that he was working for a site called Casting360.com. Meanwhile, he was aggressively trying to sell me their casting services.
What are they trying to get people who call the number to do? They want them to sign up for a $1.98 14-day trial, which gets auto-upgraded to a $34.90 monthly membership.Â
In exchange, you can use their casting services. How accurate or useful are they? I searched for my hometown, Ridgefield, Washington (pop. 5,260), 25 miles north of Portland, Oregon. In the local area, the site found 25 "entertainment professionals," almost all of whom are called "casting directors." The top three results were: a guy looking for a drummer, a freelance photographer, and a 16-year-old  with "four years experience behind a camera, and editing on both final cut pro, and iMovie." Hmm. The site sure doesn't seem like a way to break into the industry.
This is what Google suggests when you search for Casting 360:
Reiant, according to his Twitter feed, appears to like skiing in Squaw Valley. He has 16 followers. I contacted him to ask him about his company's marketing tactics, but he has not responded.Â
* * *
This is the current state of play in the Internet economy. At the top of the heap, there are the Twitters and the Apples, the name technology companies that are creating billionaires.Â
Then, down at the bottom, there are the bots, simple pieces of code that do one thing and one thing only, but do it relentlessly.Â
And in between, there's you and me and Olivia and Igor and LeBron James, and we're all connecting to each other and the Apple brand and Google and Twitter and the bots. These are strange relationships. The same bots that help scam some credulous person who wants to get into acting might make a San Diego high schooler feel famous.Â
We all want something from these networks of technologies. In a strange way, we all depend on one another. Igor needs the bots. The bots need Igor. I need Igor and the bots and Olivia. Twitter needs all of us, though they claim in regulatory filings that only five percent of their accounts are fake, based on an internal review. (It should be noted: the spambot problem definitely used to be worse.)
And yet, despite all of our connections and interdependencies, the logic of the bots remains mysterious to human beings. We know why Casting360 or whatever shady marketing company they hired sent out the bot swarm: to get "customers" and make money. But why did the bots decide to follow a San Diego girl and a bunch of golf caddies?
Trying to answer that question is like staring into the eyes of a snake. Or as Olivia summarized the existential state of social technology: "5,000 pornstars follow me and idk what to do."Â
But, I am willing to take a guess at the idea behind the metabot that created all the spambot accounts, with a huge assist from my colleague, Ian Bogost.Â
There are two things to keep in mind here.
One is that the tools of the metabot are the tools of the Twitter API, which is the interface that other software uses to interact with Twitter. That API allows coders to do some things that the standard user cannot, like return a list of all the people someone follows all at once. The metabot, that is to say, is not using only the tools you have available on your phone.
The second thing is that Twitter does have people working on bot detection, and regular users themselves are hip to the spambot game now, too. So, bots have to make some effort to disguise themselves. They have to "look" human. That's why they have those stupid bios; those are just snippets from other humans' real bios that have been chained together. That's also why they have those porny pictures. In some book of best practices for spam, it has probably been determined that you are X percent more likely to get someone to follow an account, if the avatar picture is sexy. And they want to be followed because that makes them more likely to be classified as "real" by Twitter's anti-spam bots.
Of course, the metabot does not want to create a single fake account that looks human. It wants to create tens of thousands of fake accounts that look sort of human. And it knows it should not overwhelm one user with 10,000 fake followers (though that's what happened). Rather, the bots should be spread out among many people, so that no one gets suspicious that thousands of porny spambots are following them.
So, the metabot has to find a way to swing from one set of people to follow to another set of people to follow.Â
We think the metabot first creates fake accounts that follow the most popular feeds. In the hundreds of fake accounts I've looked at, @ESPN and @JimmyFallon show up almost as often as Olivia, and that probably shouldn't surprise us because they are the first two suggestions Twitter gives, as you can see in the screenshot of the new user sign up to the right.
Remember, though, the metabot needs to spread the followers around. It needs more humans to follow than just Fallon and ESPN.Â
So, our guess is that the metabot requests the lists of people the really big accounts are following â€" "walking the network graph" â€" and then, when it creates a new account, it follows some of them. This sends spam followers to a wider and wider network as the metabot moves out from the most popular accounts.Â
That's why we see clustering in the types of accounts that any single spambot account is following, even though the bot swarm ranges across topics.
In my case, I was included with a bunch of science accounts (because Twitter actually recommends me for people who like science). But there are other spambots that are following mostly hockey accounts, or the aforementioned caddy cluster, or a fashiony group.Â
The metabot, therefore, is viral. You get followed because of who follows you.Â
This tendency explains the strange geographical cluster among San Diego high school students. Perhaps one of those kids was being followed by a really popular account (like @Interscope records, perhaps, which follows hundreds of thousands of people), and through that link, the bot stumbled into this little circle of San Diego teens.Â
All of this activity would have remained under the radar, of course, all part of the silent non-human web. Except something went awry. For some reason, Olivia got stuck in a weird loop, and the metabot kept spawning spambots that chose to follow her over and over, relentlessly.
Maybe once the metabot reached the San Diego kids, a bug kicked in. Instead of negative feedback keeping her (and everyone else) from being followed too often, we got runaway positive feedback. The bots followed her because other bots followed her. And on and on.Â
Which is, perhaps a kind of reasoning that we can understand: Â It's the core logic of fame and celebrity itself. Attention flows to Snooki because attention flowed to Snooki. Attention flows to Olivia because attention flowed to Olivia.Â
Olivia and her friends weren't wrong when they thought she'd become suddenly famous. Her audience just wasn't human.Â
By Friday evening, Twitter's anti-bot team had deleted all of the accounts, and Olivia's follower count had returned to normal. She tweeted, "I'd rather have a couple of real followers who love me than thousands of fake ones."
Then she said, "WHY DO PEOPLE FEED THEIR BABIES LEMONS."Â
