Kit Stolz

How dogs came to be one of the family

Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker delves at length into the latest theories of how dogs came to be members of our human family.

Dogs, we are now told, by a sequence of scientists and speculators—beginning with the biologists Raymond and Lorna Coppinger, in their 2001 masterwork, “Dogs”—domesticated themselves. They chose us. A marginally calmer canid came close to the circle of human warmth—and, more important, human refuse—and was tolerated by the humans inside: let him eat the garbage. Then this scavenging wolf mated with another calm wolf, and soon a family of calmer wolves proliferated just outside the firelight. It wasn’t cub-snatching on the part of humans, but breaking and entering on the part of wolves, that gave us dogs. “Hey, you be ferocious and eat them when you can catch them,” the proto-dogs said, in evolutionary effect, to their wolf siblings. “We’ll just do what they like and have them feed us. Dignity? It’s a small price to pay for free food. Check with you in ten thousand years and we’ll see who’s had more kids.” (Estimated planetary dog population: one billion. Estimated planetary wild wolf population: three hundred thousand.)

[It's a wonderful piece, as is usually the case with Gopnik, and for once the magazine puts the whole piece on line…and even includes one of a wonderful set of cartoons by the great Jules Feiffer.]

The superiority of the newspaper to the on-line version

His severance check safely deposited, long-time LA Timesman Mark Heisler, now an ex-staffer, speculates out loud about the future of his beloved institution, the newspaper:

Within newspapers, it’s assumed we’ll wind up as websites, whether or not some of us continue to print and it takes 10 years or five (or one recession).

I used to think of today’s interim as an ongoing effort to fit the building through a garden hose. The parts that didn’t fit—us—they would make fit, until the Times, which once had 1,400 editorial employees was down to today’s 500, on its way to 100, or 50.

If there’s finally no newspaper you can hold in your hands, and only a small percentage of the old revenue, there will also be no more newsprint, presses, trucks, gasoline to put in them and a physical plant, which account for all but a small percentage of the old cost.

The question is, what will be in tomorrow’s newspapers, paper or pixelated?

With all that newspapers have lost, they have something no other outlet has: the staff, institutional knowledge and experience to put things in perspective.

But it's not just the content, it's also the form of the newspaper that is superior to the on-line version, or so writes Jack Shafer for Slate, citing a recent study [pdf]:

The researchers found that the print folks "remember significantly more news stories than online news readers"; that print readers "remembered significantly more topics than online newsreaders"; and that print readers remembered "more main points of news stories." When it came to recalling headlines, print and online readers finished in a draw.

Although the number of readers tested in the study is small—just 45—the paper confirms my print-superiority bias, at least when it comes to reading the Times. The paper explores several theories for why print rules. Online newspapers tend to give few cues about a story's importance, and the "agenda-setting function" of newspapers gets lost in the process. "Online readers are apt to acquire less information about national, international and political events than print newsreaders because of the lack of salience cues; they generally are not being told what to read via story placement and prominence—an enduring feature of the print product," the researchers write. The paper finds no evidence that the "dynamic online story forms" (you know, multimedia stuff) have made stories more memorable.

In other words, the perspective that Heisler misses — the "salience cues" — embedded in the form of the physical paper, will make the same story in print readable and memorable.

Whereas, as Shafer says, it's difficult to finish any story longer than 1,000 words on-line.

Well, too bad. It's the 21st century — who has time for paper?

Scan it and weep.

Western water reporter recounts being ripped off

A nasty little irony: A first-rate Western writer about water, Emily Green, recounts how her massive five-part newspaper series on a Las Vegas water grab was scooped up and rewritten into a book by a another writer. In other words, her work on a rip-off was in turn ripped off (and she has the quotes to prove it).

How 21st century. Who has time to research and report? Cut and Paste and Run.

But it was partly her fault, she admits. She cared way too much about the issue:

I thought satisfying the Sun commission for a character-driven five-part, big-read treatment of the Vegas pipeline story required knowing the whole story, which meant months and months of work. I took so long to research and write the series that the managing editor refused to pay the bill when he saw it in late December 2007. When I moved to take the reporting elsewhere, the paper threatened to sue me. Before our lawyers parted four months later, the Sun printed an editorial saying the paper had thoroughly researched the subject and the pipeline would not harm ranchers. Knowing that its editor was sitting on evidence to the contrary, I began compulsively watching Law & Order. It didn’t matter that it was fictional. Like so many Americans, I needed a more just world than the one I actually inhabit.

She goes on to compare the "media meltdown" that devastated her old paper the Sun, as well as of course the Los Angeles Times, to global warming. Its effects are equally broad and unpredictable.

Here in Los Angeles, the situation is also grave. To use an example from my beat, Nevada didn’t invent the modern American water grab. California did, with the Chandler family’s Los Angeles Times an essential tool. Few dispute that David Halberstam was right in arguing that after 1960, Otis Chandler transformed the Times from a Chinatown-era bully pulpit into a great American newspaper. Had Halberstam lived, who knows what the author of The Powers That Be would have made of the paper’s last decade under the ownership of the Tribune Co.? A decade ago, a sordid scheme to sap an aquifer in San Bernardino County near the Mojave National Preserve was beaten back, in large part because of reporting by a once-formidable environment desk at the Times. Today, while the backer of the same plan consorts openly with the mayor of Los Angeles and former Governor Schwarzenegger’s chief of staff, the project is progressing through what passes for government review. The Times, prostrate on a bankruptcy court’s operating table, is no longer dogging the story.

This is the notorious Cadiz project. Green is a little modest; the Times may not be dogging the project, but Green certainly is a thorn in its side in that paper and on her blog (on its site) Chance of Rain.

[Here's a link to the impressive new-born Los Angeles Review of Books, where the "Cut and Paste and Run" piece ran, and a photo from it as well, on the virtual cover of the LARB]

Yosemite deaths in 2011: Couch potato phenomenon?

That's the hint dropped in Matt Weiser's excellent examination of the numerous deaths this year in the Yosemite Valley recently in the Sacramento Bee. He suggests that visitors to the park are just too removed from nature in their minds to recognize the risks of nature when they encounter them in life.

Visitorship is up — as an excellent graphic shows, reaching a record 700,000 for the month of July — but deaths are rising at an even faster rate.

"In the past, you had to be a pretty hardy soul to get out to some of these areas — almost a Grizzly Adams or Lewis and Clark," said [James] Kozlowski, [a professor at George Mason U], "Now, with the technology we have, some couch potato can get out into an area where they probably shouldn't be."

Weiser then finds facts to support the good professor's theory: Deaths in nature in California are growing at three times the rate of population in the state. He even finds a ranger who points out that it's possible to be fit on a machine in a gym, but still not know how to safely descend a rocky trail.

It's impressive reporting. Though when it comes to impressive, it's tough to beat a picture of any of the three single biggest hazards in the park — Vernal Falls, the Emerald Pool, or the Mist Trail.

[pic of Mist Trail from Bernard Siao]

Studio exec: Forget story. It’s all about spectacle.

In Variety, a Disney studio exec makes brutally clear what has become increasingly obvious over the last few years. Big movie audiences no longer care much about character, dialogue, or even story — what they want is spectacle.

"People say 'It's all about the story,'" [Andy] Hendrickson said. "When you're making tentpole films, bullshit." Hendrickson showed a chart of the top 12 all-time domestic grossers, and noted every one is a spectacle film. Of his own studio's "Alice in Wonderland," which is on the list, he said: "The story isn't very good, but visual spectacle brought people in droves. And Johnny Depp didn't hurt."

The obvious counter to this claim is that, okay, this might be true in big movies, backed by $100 million or more in advertising, but not so much in other productions, or plays, for instance.

But in fact the biggest hit to come out of London theater in the last year or so, the hit that has won a slew of awards on both sides of the Atlantic, the play that is being made into a movie for release this Christmas by Steven Spielberg is Warhorse…which is a great spectacle.

It's a freaking masterpiece of animal representation, in fact, brilliantly and touchingly accomplished. Nonetheless the show has remarkably little to offer in the way of character or dialogue, and only enough story to make us care about the fate of the animals. In truth, the cute little puppet duck in the play is far more memorable than anything that any human says in the two or so hours on stage.

A spectacle, in other words. Here's a scene that pits the stage horse vs. a tank.

Spectacle can be great. But as Michael Addison, the newly-named director of Theater 150, pointed out to me in an interview, spectacle is the last and least of the theatrical virtues mentioned by Aristotle.

Today it's all about what we can see. What we can hear, or think, or feel, is secondary.

Mulling the last of the Harry Potter movies, a spectacle, but with emotion too, New Yorker critic David Denby admired the film, but nonetheless wondered if the young fans of the series…

…will be able, in ten years, to sit still for a movie without special effects and magic, a movie in which a man and a woman face each other across a table and simply talk. Or will any film without horcruxes and hippogriffs seem lifeless and dull?

I wonder too.

How Healthy are Our Oceans?

My cover story, this week in the VCReporter. I especially liked that both a commercial fisherman and a devout sports fisherman praised government regulators for maintaining the fisheries in SoCal:

Both commercial fishermen and sport fishermen agree [that the fisheries are in decent shape].

“I think it’s doing pretty good,” said Pete DuPuy, who has been fishing commercially off Ventura County for nearly 20 years and currently captains a squid boat. “There seems to be plenty of fish. Especially off the West Coast, the U.S. fishery is heavily regulated, and I think California Fish and Game has done a good job taking care of it. You go to fish down off Mexico and it’s different – the resource has been hammered pretty well down there.”

Sport fisherman Jerry Stussman, who has been chartering boats to go fishing off Ventura as much as three times a week for more than 30 years, echoes DuPuy’s comments.

“Since the beginning of the year, the water has warmed up, and I’d say the fishing is very good to excellent right now,” he commented. “A record 69-pound halibut was caught last week. We’re catching our limit sometimes in less than an hour. We fisherman argue, we scream, we moan and groan about what the environmentalists are doing, but no one can argue that the result has been positive.”

How often do you hear that sort of comment from fishermen? And I didn't solicit it at all.

In any case, as a marine biologist friend said in the story, the ocean certainly still looks great. Almost can't help it. Here's a pic, taken off the Channel Islands, courtesy of Flickr and Perpetual Sunset.

Wander here a whole summer, if you can: John Muir

Wander here a whole summer, if you can. Thousands of God’s wild blessings will search you and soak you as if you were sponge, and the big days will go by uncounted. If you are business-tangled, and so burdened with duty that only weeks can be get out of the heavy-laden year, then go to the Flathead Reserve; for it is easily and quickly reached by the Great Northern Railroad. Get off the track at Belton Station, and in a few minutes you will find yourself in the midst of what you are sure to say is the best care-killing scenery on the continent,—beautiful lakes derived straight from glaciers, lofty mountains steeped in lovely nemophila-blue skies and clad with forests and glaciers, mossy, ferny waterfalls in their hollows, nameless and numberless, and meadowy gardens abounding in the best of everything.

John Muir, Our National Parks, 1901, chapter one

Well, the family and I can't spend a whole summer…but we can spend most of a week at Cottonwood lakes…come back and see me again next weekend!

[Thanks to Flickr's nickdella for the pic of the lakes near Cirque Peak]

Arctic ice not yet at point of no return, researchers say

Given the dramatic decline in summer ice coverage in the Arctic in recent years, some researchers have feared we are approaching the end of summer ice in the Arctic. But a new study, examining ancient driftwood found along the shores of Greenland, argues in Science that in fact it was much warmer 5000-8000 years ago. This means that summer ice in the Arctic may be able to survive human-caused global warming, presuming we are able to get a handle on emissions sometime this century.

From the Vancouver Sun:

While the researchers say they expect global warming will eventually make the Arctic sea ice disappear, they say the dire warnings about its imminent demise have been overstated.

"The bad news is that there is a clear connection between temperature and the amount of sea ice," says lead author Svend Funder, at the University of Copenhagen, adding there is "no doubt" continued global warming will reduce Arctic summer sea ice.

"The good news is that even with a reduction to less than 50 per cent of the current amount of sea ice, the ice will not reach a point of no return," says Funder, who has headed several treks to the inhospitable north coast of Greenland to get a better read on how the ice waxes and wanes.

Satellite records showing how the ice grows and retreats only go back to early 1979 — and suggest 2011 could see another record ice loss.

It's not great news. We are continuing to lose ice rapidly in the Arctic, as this graph from the National Snow and Ice Data Center illustrates:

At first I thought this news would be helpful, because it would help keep us connected to the planet,m Now I wonder if it will simply help us ignore the whole problem.

[Note: after extended discussion in comments below, headline corrected above]

Roshomon: Made in America (to start)

One of the greatest films of all time, the critics agree, is Akira Kurosawa's masterpiece Roshomon. Turns out it's based on a Japanese short story, that in turn was based on a story by Ambrose Bierce, the infamous Western wit, aka "the San Francisco Wasp," who disappeared in Mexico.

The story turned up recently on a site launched by the Library of America, which each week has been offering a classic America story, fiction and non-fiction, in its Story of the Week.

What's amazing about the Bierce story, called The Moonlit Road, is that a) the reader is left to figure out the truth of the murder story for him or herself — the plot offers no conclusion, and b) the last of the three sections of story is narrated by a medium, channeling the story of the murder victim!

It's a strange but enthralling story, fascinating in part because the last narrator, the channeled ghost, insists she knows not whereof she speaks:

Forgive, I pray you, this inconsequent digression by what was once a woman. You who consult us in this imperfect way —you do not understand. You ask foolish questions about things unknown and things forbidden. Much that we know and could impart in our speech is meaningless in yours. You think that we are of another world. No, we have knowledge of no world but yours, though for us it holds no sunlight, no warmth, no music, no laughter, no song of birds, nor any companionship. O God! what a thing it is to be a ghost, cowering and shivering in an altered world, a prey to apprehension and despair!

Creepy. Time for a remake?

It's a great movie, but technically not so much.

12 million imperiled by crop failure in Africa: Why?

A month ago, in England, one could not pick up a newspaper without reading about the 12 million people who are imperiled by drought and starvation in the Horn of Africa.

So this morning it's good to see a major American newspaper, the Los Angeles Times, put the story of the worst famine in the world in twenty years on its front page, complete with harrowing pictures.

But it's a little frustrating that the story never even glances at the root cause of the frequently-mentioned drought.

Could it be climate change?

After all, leading climatologists such as Kevin Trenberth have frequently warned that the sub-Saharan Africa will dry out in the decades to come. And respected NGOs such as Oxfam have linked climate change to rising food prices already this year.

So it's good to see the Voice of America take a look at the question, though the story doesn't come to a clear conclusion.

Some scientists point the finger at a familiar culprit: La Niña.

Others say climate change may be a factor — possibly:

Columbia University climate scientist Simon Mason says the human factor in the Horn’s climate woes is less clear.

"East Africa is one of our big perplexing areas for the moment," Mason says.

Several groups around the world have developed computer models to predict how increasing greenhouse gases will change the climate.

"Most of the models are actually suggesting that East Africa will become wetter," Mason says. "However, if we look at what's been happening in East Africa at least for the last decade or so, it's actually been getting quite a lot drier."

Mason says that drying trend is at least partly due to global warming, which is contributing to rising temperatures in the Indian Ocean. That creates conditions that draw moisture away from East Africa.

But the suffering is clear, as in this picture of refugees in Somalia, hoping to be allowed into a camp.

Perhaps that's why the Times story stayed away from the science.