This beautiful Turkish tourist town is now home to boats stuffed with refugees and migrants headed for Lesbos

October 9, 2015                                                                                    PRI'S THE WORLD

Staring out from the high cliffs above the ancient Greek city of Assos in Turkey, now a beautiful tourist town, your vision merges with the vast blueness of the sky and Aegean Sea until it rests on the melodious green hills of the island of Lesbos in the distance. It’s a grand view that has captivated people for millennia.

Aristotle lived there for a time before leaving for Lesbos, where he and Theophrastus did seminal work classifying flora and fauna.

The ancient Theatre of Assos overlooking the Aegean Sea, with the nearby island of Lesbos on the horizon.

Credit: Vindobona/Wikimedia Commons

Today it’s also an excellent vantage point to observe boats stuffed with refugees and migrants from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and other nations leaving from camps run by the Turkish mafia. They are bound for Lesbos, only five miles away at the closest point. On the other side, a ragged group of NGOs, foreign and local volunteers and international media await them with long camera lenses, hugs and, if they’re lucky, some water, pieces of fruit and dry clothing.

The day I arrived in Assos to meet Peter Bouckaert of Human Rights Watch, some 50 boats carrying 3,500 refugees would reach Lesbos, adding to the 400,000 who have passed through Greece this year — 100,000 in August alone. Most of the Lesbos-bound boats left from five camps tucked into the pretty olive groves that dot the shoreline around Assos....

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'Please, have some tea.' For refugees, civility before danger.

October 2, 2015                                                                  PRI's The World

IZMIR, Turkey  “Please, have some tea. Do you take sugar?”

“Yes, thank you.”

“This is Syrian tea. Please, it is our pleasure.”

 “Thank you.”

The Syrians I meet in the small square outside the Sinbad Restaurant in Izmir, Turkey are all fleeing an escalating war in their country they say has made it impossible for them to stay in their homes.

Sinbad Cafe in Basmane neighborhood in Izmir

Asas, a fashion designer from Damascus in his early 30s, tells me that mortar shells are falling all over the capital, even in formerly “safe” neighborhoods. Recently a bomb fell during his fashion show; the before-and-after photos on his mobile phone show elegant evening gowns, then exploded plaster and hanging wires.

Nour is just 17 and is traveling alone. “If you are walking in the streets suddenly you hear deeewwww,” he says, crouching a little, “a missile or an explosion. There is no life.” His two older brothers have already gone to Europe. His parents are still in Syria and call him constantly on Skype or Whatsapp. “My father’s soul is with me,” he says.

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Rough Aegean Seas Don't Deter Refugees

 September 30, 2015                                                                   PRI's The World

IZMIR, Turkey  Reporter Jeanne Carstensen in Turkish town of Izmir tells host Carol Hills about new dangers facing the migrants and refugees who work with smugglers.

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Landfall. A selfie. Another refugee celebrates survival.

 September 25, 2015                                                                         PRI's The World

LESBOS, Greece  Today I joined the pack of volunteers and media awaiting the arrival of refugee boats to the Greek island of Lesbos from Turkey — just a few miles away across the Aegean Sea.

My companions from the BBC and I had coffee in the picturesque fishing village of Sykaminia. An old Greek man with a bushy mustache sat on the dock slowly rinsing sand out of a freshly caught squid.

Refugees arrive to Lesbos from Turkey, Sept. 25, 2015

The stretch of coast on Lesbos where the biggest wave of refugees since World War II has been coming ashore is a rugged, mountainous landscape of steep olive groves and oaks dotted with small villages.

It’s easy to feel that here the time machine got jammed back around the beginning of the last century, until you look down the rocky shore and see that it is littered with the carcasses of destroyed inflatable boats and immense piles of hundreds of brightly colored life jackets left behind by refugees.

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Migrants and Refugees Continue to Pour Ashore in Greece

 September 23, 2015                            PRI's The World

LESBOS, Greece  Twenty-six overcrowded boatloads of migrants and refugees landed on the Greek island of Lesbos Wednesday. Some 2,500 people made it ashore, after making the dangerous and expensive trip from Turkey. Host Marco Werman speaks with reporter Jeanne Carstensen on Lesbos.

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The Ambiguous Colors of Nanotechnology: Kate Nichols’ nanoparticle paints have changed how she sees color

July 2015                                                                                                          Nautilus

Kate Nichols leans her delicate face against the glass of a chemical fume hood in a University of California, Berkeley lab, peering into a beaker filled with a pale yellow liquid—“like a well hydrated person’s pee,” she says, laughing. The yellow brew is a fresh batch of silver nanoparticles. Over the next week, the liquid will turn green, then turquoise, then blue as the particles morph in shape from spheroids to prisms under the influence of time and fluorescent light. Post-docs and grad students elsewhere in the nanotech lab are synthesizing nanoparticles for research on artificial photosynthesis and quantum dot digital displays. But not Nichols. She isn’t a scientist, but an artist, gripped by color.

Read more @Nautilus

(ESSAY) “You are not just an affair”: I fell for the world’s oldest romantic cliché — being human

 July 2015                                                                                                  Salon

When my lover and I arrived at the Pont des Arts in Paris I immediately wanted to hook a lock with our initials on it to the mass of other “love locks” dangling from the railings on both sides of the bridge.

(Credit: JaysonPhotography via Shutterstock)

 I took her hand and whispered my intentions into her ear.  She turned her head slowly toward me, and I saw that she was — really? — rolling her eyes. She looked beautiful in her classic black wool coat, pulled tight around her neck against the October chill.  Her silver hair, with an impeccable French cut, fell dashingly across her face.  I loved that hair.

Now I know that the French had grown weary of the locks on the Pont des Arts.  What began as a romantic gesture by couples in the 2000s had turned into a tourist scourge weighing many tons.  Not only were the locks — quelle horreur — ugly, they were threatening to sink the bridge into the Seine.  In fact, Paris officials recently announced that they are going to cut off the whole lot of them.  Read more @Salon

Robots Can't Dance: Why the singularity is greatly exaggerated

January, 2015                                                                                                          Nautilus

Illustration by James Yang for Nautilus

Can a robot be creative? Advances in cloud robotics—machines connected to supercomputers in the cloud—have given self-driving cars, surgical robots, and other “smart” devices tremendous powers of computation. But can a robot, even one supercharged with artificial intelligence, be creative? Will a mechanical Picasso paint among us?    Read more @ Nautilus

Ingenious: Ken Goldberg -- Creative robots, the Kurzweil fallacy, and what it means to be human

January, 2015                                                                                                       Nautilus

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We are not on the verge of a “singularity,” when intelligent robots will take control. In fact, Ken Goldberg told me in this interview at his lab at UC Berkeley, his work in robotics has made him appreciate the quirks of humanness that can’t be modeled with algorithms. Smart robots and artificial intelligence systems can enhance our creative capacities, but true creativity remains a singularly human trait.  
Read more @ Nautilus

Slam Poet Bob Holman Tracks Endangered Languages in New Film

January, 2015                                                                                                KQEDArts

Bob Holman is a word man. His decades of frenetic activity in the slam poetry, hip-hop and spoken-word scenes once led Henry Louis Gates, Jr. to call him “the postmodern promoter who has done more to bring poetry to cafes and bars than anyone since Ferlinghetti.”

Bob Holman with Rupert Manmurulu in Australia. (Photo: David Grubin)

Now, Holman is pouring his love for words into a movement to save the world’s endangered languages. There are roughly 6,500 languages spoken around the world today; linguists estimate that by the end of the century, that number could be cut in half. That’s right: Some 3,000 languages could soon pass away from this sweet earth.

“Every language contains a singular way of looking at the world,” Holman tells me by email. “The brain may be infinite, but we’ve only been able to invent 6,000 of these ways of looking at things. To lose one of these is a tragedy.”   Read more @ KQEDArts

Job Fair for Bacteria at Modernism Gallery

October 23, 2014                                                                                               KQEDArts                                                                                                                                                                                       
It wasn’t clear that Mark Zuckerberg was going to show up, but Jonathon Keats was hopeful. Tuesday night was the launch of Microbial Associates, the world’s first corporate training academy for microbes.

Photo by Chrissy Hughes. Courtesy of Modernism Gallery, San Francisco."

With Silicon Valley companies struggling to add diversity to their workforce and otherwise stay competitive in the rapidly evolving global marketplace, Keats saw an opening. The industry is hungry for disruptive technologies, so why not train and certify bacteria to join the workforce and bring their skill set to the corporate environment?

After all, “2.3 billion years ago they fundamentally changed the composition of the atmosphere,” Keats, who is the founder and managing director, explained. “Oxygenation. It doesn’t get any more disruptive than that.”

This isn’t the first business that Keats has launched at Modernism Gallery. The experimental philosopher, artist and writer also created a real estate investment company offering properties in extra dimensions and a start-up that tried to genetically engineer god, among other endeavors...

 (more at KQED Arts)

(ESSAY) For Syrian Refugees, Even Jail Is Paradise

December, 2013                                                                         Al Jazeera America

“I know a woman in Izmir who has tried three times to make it to Greece by boat,” a Syrian traveler named Ammar told me.

“What happened?” I asked.

Asylum seekers in Turkey.  Ali Balli/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

“Three times it sank, ” he replied
 
We met in the rooftop bar of the Nomade Hotel in Istanbul, enjoying the spectacular view of the domes and minarets of the Blue Mosque. I was in town with my friend Tzeli for a symposium celebrating Semiha Es, Turkey’s first female photojournalist, and we were chatting with Colleen, a woman from Philadelphia who had been traveling the world for almost two years.

 That morning Colleen told me she was heading to Athens the next day, but then she was talking about going to Geneva or the U.S. instead. Her face glowed blue from her laptop screen as she clicked through plane fares on a discount travel site. “I don’t know. Maybe I should go to the States for a bit,” she said, tapping on the keyboard. “It’s so cheap now. My dad is 84. I could see him for Christmas.” Tap, tap. “But Geneva is so great in the winter!” (more)

Dress for Evolutionary Success

April, 2013                                                                                                    Nautilus

Picture one of those ascent-of-man charts that depict a progression of profiles, from an ape walking on all fours to a slumped hominid to a modern human standing erect. What’s missing? The modern human is naked. No accessories!

Illustration by John Hendrix

 We may not find a chapter on fashion in science textbooks but ornamentation and tailoring have played feature roles in our success as a species. On the prehistoric catwalks we creamed the Neanderthal competition on both functionality and style and went on to become the dominant hominid in virtually every climate zone on earth. 

As I discovered through a host of interviews with paleontologists, anthropologists, evolutionary psychologists, and fashion historians, clothes don’t just make the man—they make us human. Clothes and body decoration evolved in a suite of human communication tools and behaviors that have shaped the runway of human evolution and culture.

Fashion has been as “crucial to the emergence of the modern human as music and dance, art and humor, and language,” says evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller, an associate professor of psychology at the University of New Mexico. “It’s a legitimate part of human nature.”

That’s hardly news to the well-dressed man and woman. Still, putting fashion and science in the same sentence can seem a little strange. So, to reassure you that the pride and excitement you feel when you put on an Armani suit or a pair of Manolo Blahniks is emotionally legit, let’s turn back to our evolutionary past. The dawn of clothes reveals that we were born to strut.   (More)

Inside The Secret World of Plant Communication

April, 2013                                                                                                    Modern Farme

Photos by Sarah Illenberger

 Without plants, humans and animals could not survive, so it’s no wonder we long to communicate with them. Many past civilizations worshiped plants and have tried to converse with them through rituals and other means.  Read more @Modern Farmer

How to Grow A Cocktail

March, 2013                                                                                        Modern Farmer

What do you see when you walk into a liquor store? If you’re nature writer Amy Stewart, you see “the world’s most exotic botanical garden, the sort of strange and overgrown conservatory we only encounter in our dreams.” Indeed, without plants we wouldn’t have the martini. Or prosecco. Or single-malt scotch. Almost every element that goes into a great drink—from the fermented grains and grapes, to the herbs and fruits that flavor them, to the celery stalk in your glass—is a denizen of the plant world. Stewart’s latest book, The Drunken Botanist: The Plants That Create the World’s Great Drinks, tells the story of over 150 of these intoxicating flora and includes loads of tips for bartenders, gardeners and farmers on the art of alcohol.

 What are some weird plants that can show up in an alcoholic beverage?
You name it. If it’s a fruit or an herb, if it’s edible, someone somewhere has dropped it into some alcohol and made booze out of it. A lot of these plants go back to medieval medicine. Capillaire syrup was originally a medicinal thing made from maidenhair fern that was supposed to treat jaundice. But it became sweet botanical syrup that ended up as a cocktail ingredient. No one makes maidenhair syrup anymore. But you could. And I have.

What’s it used for?
Mostly old punch recipes like Jerry Thomas’ Regent Punch, which is one of those strange drinks that have green tea, Champagne and all kinds of crazy things.  (More)

(ESSAY) Safety Not Guaranteed

November 4, 2012                                                                          Religion Dispatches

Looking at the online flood zone map of our neighborhood, I feel calm.

  

NYC Flood Zone Evacuation Map

I’m a bit of a map freak and I appreciate how clearly this one presents the information and how easily I can navigate within it. I know, vaguely, that the East Village is vulnerable to flooding from the East River but now I can see the facts. Zooming in, I see the exact boundaries of Zone A—the mandatory evacuation zone. It extends from the river up to the public housing blocks along FDR Drive, to the German Biergarten on Avenue C, up to Sheens on Avenue B, the bodega where you can spend $8 on a carton of milk and toilet paper.

We live just to the west of Avenue B—bright red on the map, along with everything to the east. Mayor Bloomberg has ordered everyone living in the Red zone to evacuate. The storm looks big on the satellite images, really gnarly.  (more)

Today’s Vineyards, Yesterday’s Tall Oaks

 April 21, 2012                                                  New York Times/The Bay Citizen

On a recent sunny day in the Napa Valley, Robin Grossinger cupped his hands around his eyes and surveyed the landscape. He said the scene gave him “a feeling of grandeur.”

Tidal marshlands. Courtesy CA Historical Society

He was not talking about the vistas of hillsides draped in vineyards, with their gnarled vines tinged green with new growth that by fall will be laden with the valley’s renowned cabernet sauvignon and other grapes. Mr. Grossinger, a scientist with the San Francisco Estuary Institute and author of the new Napa Valley Historical Ecology Atlas, had turned his gaze onto another charismatic species: a small line of valley oak trees. 

While today’s visitors — around five million annually — come to drink wine and soak up the beauty of Napa’s viticultural landscape, past visitors came to marvel at the majestic oaks. 

The area where Mr. Grossinger was standing, near Oak Knoll in the southern end of the valley, is where travelers entering from the south first took in the beauty of the oak savannas that defined the valley floor, bursting with wildflowers in the spring. The trees at Oak Knoll supported abundant wildlife and created shade in the heat, among other benefits, prompting the California State Senate in 1858 to declare them “at once an ornament and a blessing.” (more)

Berkeley Group Digs In to Challenge of Making Sense of All That Data

April 7, 2012                                             New York Times/The Bay Citizen

It comes in “torrents” and “floods” and threatens to “engulf” everything that stands in its path.

 No, it is not a tsunami, it is Big Data, the incomprehensibly large amount of raw, often real-time data that keeps piling up faster and faster from scientific research, social media, smartphones — virtually any activity that leaves a digital trace. 

The sheer size of the pile (measured in petabytes, one million gigabytes, or even exabytes, one billion gigabytes) combined with its complexity has threatened to overwhelm just about everybody, including the scientists who specialize in wrangling it. 

“It’s easier to collect data,” said Michael Franklin, a professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, “and harder to make sense of it.” (more)

Law, Order and a Life in Robes

 March 23, 2012                                                             New York Times/The Bay Citizen

As he had many times before, Judge Vaughn R. Walker — impeccably dressed in a gray suit and muted red tie — took command of the room.

It was not a courtroom, but the Verdi Club, the site of a law-and-order-themed evening of storytelling hosted by San Francisco’s Porchlight storytelling series on Monday night. 

Judge V. Walker takes the stage.  Photo by Adithya Sambamurthy

 Judge Walker, recently retired from Federal District Court, became something of a local celebrity after his 2010 ruling that Proposition 8, the voter-approved California measure that banned same-sex marriage, was unconstitutional. He became even more of a lightning rod after it was revealed that he is gay. So expectations ran high when he took the stage under yellow and purple lights and the flash of a disco ball, telling the crowd that he had been told not to expect a typical legal audience. “That, I assume, was a compliment to you,” he said. 

He quipped about how, in the courtroom, he was not used to being accompanied by a piano player, particularly “one that I know when I go on too long is going to start playing.” (more)

A Performance of Relentless Stillness, With Live Score

March 16, 2012                                                The New York Times/The Bay Citizen

Eiko, the female half of Eiko and Koma, the contemporary movement arts duo who have performed together for some 40 years, hurled her small frame onto an oblong pile of canvas and feathers on the floor of the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

 

“Naked, naked!” she said mischievously, gesturing to herself to indicate how she and Koma will appear in “Fragile,” a new four-hour performance with a score performed live onstage by the Kronos Quartet at the arts center through Saturday. 

Photo by Anna Lee Campbell

 The evening was an informal preview of the couple’s two-week Yerba Buena residency, which also includes performances of three iconic early works and a series of workshops and other events.

Just as quickly, Koma darted from standing to lying down on the opposite side of the nestlike pile. Then he jumped up again and ran to the other side of a large backdrop covered in feathers and salt suspended from the ceiling. 

“This is what people do who don’t want to see the naked bodies,” he said with a teasing tone, peeking back at Eiko through one of the many holes in the canvas as if he were embarrassed. 

If anything characterizes Eiko and Koma’s art, it is the slow, even glacial pace of their movements — sometimes so slow they are almost imperceptible, like ice melting. They describe their work, which evokes a deep connection with nature and deals with elemental themes like nakedness, hunger and death, as “infused with relentless stillness that subverts and transcends our everyday notions of time and space.” (More)