High Tech / Low Tech

GOOD — Mon, 1 Oct 2007 19:37:42 PDT

In 1965, Intel co-founder Gordon Moore boldly declared that computer chips would double in effectiveness every two years for the conceivable future. His prediction-which has proven more than true-is just one example of the rapid development of technology in the last five decades that has improved our lives immeasurably.

But technology is not only what powers shiny gadgets whose inner workings are beyond our comprehension. It is, more broadly, all the ways in which we as a society can harness the potential that exists in the world. And so this issue celebrates technology in all its forms, from mathematics that predict the future to a water purifier made of spare toilet parts.

Sometimes, the best technology has to offer is a speedy processor. Other times, ones and zeroes are less effective than a hammer. Everything we need lies somewhere in the vast spectrum between high tech and low tech. It's there for the taking.

High Tech / Low Tech Features

The New Nostradamus

Michael A. M. Lerner talks with the man who is putting the "science" back in political science.

If It Ain't Broke...

GOOD explores seven practices that haven't changed much over time for one simple reason: they got it right on the first try.

Get a Life

Morgan Clendaniel ambles around the ghost town that is Second Life in search of the digital frontier (and a cheap penis).

Low-Tech Laboratory

A group of renegade engineers at MIT is creating elegantly simple solutions to global problems.

You've Got Mail!

Sam Schwartz hitches a ride on a government mule to traverse the United States Postal Service's most dangerous route.

The New Nostradamus

Michael A.M. Lerner — Mon, 1 Oct 2007 18:59:26 PDT

Can a fringe branch of mathematics forecast the future? A special adviser to the CIA, Fortune 500 companies, and the U.S. Department of Defense certainly thinks so.

If you listen to Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, and a lot of people don't, he'll claim that mathematics can tell you the future. In fact, the professor says that a computer model he built and has perfected over the last 25 years can predict the outcome of virtually any international conflict, provided the basic input is accurate. What's more, his predictions are alarmingly specific. His fans include at least one current presidential hopeful, a gaggle of Fortune 500 companies, the CIA, and the Department of Defense. Naturally, there is also no shortage of people less fond of his work. "Some people think Bruce is the most brilliant foreign policy analyst there is," says one colleague. "Others think he's a quack."

Today, on a rare sunny summer day in San Francisco, Bueno de Mesquita appears to be neither. He's relaxing in his stately home, answering my questions with exceeding politesse. Sunlight streams through the tall windows, the melodic sound of a French horn echoing from somewhere upstairs; his daughter, a musician in a symphony orchestra, is practicing for an upcoming recital. It's all so complacent and genteel, which is exactly what Bueno de Mesquita isn't. As if on cue, a question sets him off. "I found it to be offensive," he says about a colleague's critique of his work. "This is absolutely, totally, and utterly false," he says about the attack of another.

The criticism rankles him, because, to his mind, the proof is right there on the page. "I've published a lot of forecasting papers over the years," he says. "Papers that are about things that had not yet happened when the paper was published but would happen within some reasonable amount of time. There's a track record that I can point to." And indeed there is. Bueno de Mesquita has made a slew of uncannily accurate predictions-more than 2,000, on subjects ranging from the terrorist threat to America to the peace process in Northern Ireland-that would seem to prove him right.

"The days of the digital watch are numbered," quipped Tom Stoppard. After spending a few hours with Bueno de Mesquita, you might come to believe that so is everything else. Numbered as in "mathematics"-more precisely, game theory, an esoteric branch of mathematics used to analyze interaction. "Game theory is math for how people behave strategically," Bueno de Mesquita says.

Bueno de Mesquita has big ideas, and he's more than happy to put his career on the line for them. Back in March 2004, when al-Qaeda bombed a Madrid train station, influencing the course of Spain's general election three days later, a lot of U.S. security folks were nervous. Worried that al-Qaeda might try something similar here in the run-up to the November, 2004, presidential elections, the Pentagon hired Bueno de Mesquita to run some data through his forecasting model to tell them what to expect. The results were unequivocal. "I said there would be no homeland attack. I also indicated that bin Laden's second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, would resurface around Thanksgiving, 2004," he says. Just after the elections in November that year, Zawahiri released a new videotape. Bueno de Mesquita was right on both counts. "One of the things government needs most is advice that's not wishy-washy. I try to be as precise as I can."

For the record, this man is not some lunatic soothsayer sequestered in a musty, forgotten basement office. He is the chairman of New York University's Department of Politics, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford, and the author of many weighty academic tomes. He regularly consults with the CIA and the Department of Defense-most recently on such hot-button topics as Iran and North Korea-and has a new book coming out in the fall that he cowrote with his pal Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. His curriculum vitae, which details his various Ph.Ds, academic appointments, editorial-board memberships, writings, honors, awards, and grants, runs 17 small-font pages long.

He is wildly controversial, though. As one of the foremost scholars of game theory-or "rational choice," as its political-science practitioners prefer to call it-Bueno de Mesquita is at the center of a raging hullabaloo that has taken over some of the most prestigious halls of learning in this country. Exclusive, highly complex mathematically, and messianic in its certainty of universal truths, rational-choice theory is not only changing the way political science is taught, but the way it's defined.

To verify the accuracy of his model, the CIA set up a kind of forecasting face-off that pit predictions from his model against those of Langley's more traditional in-house intelligence analysts and area specialists. "We tested Bueno de Mesquita's model on scores of issues that were conducted in real time-that is, the forecasts were made before the events actually happened," says Stanley Feder, a former high-level CIA analyst. "We found the model to be accurate 90 percent of the time," he wrote. Another study evaluating Bueno de Mesquita's real-time forecasts of 21 policy decisions in the European community concluded that "the probability that the predicted outcome was what indeed occurred was an astounding 97 percent." What's more, Bueno de Mesquita's forecasts were much more detailed than those of the more traditional analysts. "The real issue is the specificity of the accuracy," says Feder. "We found that DI (Directorate of National Intelligence) analyses, even when they were right, were vague compared to the model's forecasts. To use an archery metaphor, if you hit the target, that's great. But if you hit the bull's eye-that's amazing."

How does Bueno de Mesquita do this? With mathematics. "You start with a set of assumptions, as you do with anything, but you do it in a formal, mathematical way," he says. "You break them down as equations and work from there to see what follows logically from those assumptions." The assumptions he's talking about concern each actor's motives. You configure those motives into equations that are, essentially, statements of logic based on a predictive theory of how people with those motives will behave. From there, you start building your mathematical model. You determine whether the predictive theory holds true by plugging in data, which are numbers derived from scales of preferences that you ascribe to each actor based on the various choices they face.

The Prisoner's Dilemma, a basic in game theory, explains it well: Two burglars are apprehended near the scene of a crime and are interrogated separately by the police. The police know these two goons did it, but they don't know how, so they offer each one a deal. If they both confess and cooperate, they'll both get a minor sentence of five years. If neither man confesses, they'll both only get one year (for having been caught with some of the stolen loot on them). But, and here's where it gets interesting, if one confesses and the other doesn't, the one who confesses walks out scot-free while the other will do 10 years. What will they do? Will they trust each other and do what's obviously in their best interest, which is not confess? Based on game theory's assumptions about human nature, the math derived from this dilemma tells you squarely that the two goons will turn each other in.

Quote:

In the foreboding world view of rational choice, everyone is a raging dirtbag.

Which illustrates the next incontrovertible fact about game theory: In the foreboding world view of rational choice, everyone is a raging dirtbag. Bueno de Mesquita points to dictatorships to prove his point: "If you liberate people from the constraint of having to satisfy other people in order to advance themselves, people don't do good things." When analyzing a problem in international relations, Bueno de Mesquita doesn't give a whit about the local culture, history, economy, or any of the other considerations that more traditional political scientists weigh. In fact, rational choicers like Bueno de Mesquita tend to view such traditional approaches with a condescension bordering on disdain. "One is the study of politics as an expression of personal opinion as opposed to political science," he says dryly. His only concern is with what the political actors want, what they say they want (often two very different things), and how each of their various options will affect their career advancement. He feeds this data into his computer model and out pop the answers.

Though controversial in the academic world, Bueno de Mesquita and his model have proven quite popular in the private sector. In addition to his teaching responsibilities and consulting for the government, he also runs a successful private business, Mesquita & Roundell, with offices in Rockefeller Center. Advising some of the top companies in the country, he earns a tidy sum: Mesquita & Roundell's minimum fee is $50,000 for a project that includes two issues. Most projects involve multiple issues. "I'm not selling my wisdom," he says. "I'm selling a tool that can help them get better results. That tool is the model."

"In the private sector, we deal with three areas: litigation, mergers and acquisitions, and regulation," he says. "On average in litigation, we produce a settlement that is 40 percent better than what the attorneys think is the best that can be achieved." While Bueno de Mesquita's present client list is confidential, past clients include Union Carbide, which needed a little help in structuring its defense after its 1984 chemical-plant disaster in Bhopal, India, claimed the lives of an estimated 22,000 people; the giant accounting firm Arthur Andersen; and British Aerospace during its merger with GEC-Marconi.

But there are limits to what his company will do. For example, Bueno de Mesquita may already know, but he won't say who'll succeed George W. Bush in the White House. "We have a corporate policy that we will not, on a commercial basis, use the model in campaigns," he says. "We don't think it's appropriate to manipulate the democratic process. We won't take a client who wants to manipulate U.S. government policy, even if we agree with the manipulation. And we won't take a foreign client whose objectives are contrary to the objectives of the United States government."

There's also the book he's written with Condoleezza Rice and two other authors, The Strategy of Campaigning, which comes out in the fall. Given the Bush administration's heavy ideological bent-which would seem to represent everything a rationalist like Bueno de Mesquita opposes-how does he justify putting his name on the same dust jacket as Rice's? Bueno de Mesquita repositions himself in his chair. "The central question in this book is a question that Condi raised before she came to Washington," he says. (So is her name there just to sell books? "We are making a concerted effort not to play up the fact that the Secretary of State is a co-author," he later adds.)

Meanwhile, he has just launched and is the director of NYU's Alexander Hamilton Center. "The mission for the center is the application of logic and evidence to solving fundamental policy problems. Not to a bipartisan solution, but to a nonpartisan solution." In his continuing work for the CIA and the Defense Department, one of his most recent assignments has been North Korea and its nuclear program. His analysis starts from the premise that what Kim Jong Il cares most about is his political survival. As Bueno de Mesquita sees it, the principal reason for his nuclear program is to deter the United States from taking him out, by raising the costs of doing so. "The solution, then, lies in a mechanism that guarantees us that he not use these weapons and guarantees him that we not interfere with his political survival," he says.

Quote:

They said my work was evil, offensive, that it should be suppressed. It was a very difficult time in my career.-Bruce Bueno de Mesquita

Perhaps not coincidentally, the recent agreement that the United States reached with the government of Pyongyang closely resembles the one that Bueno de Mesquita's model suggested: Kim agrees to dismantle his existing nuclear weapons but not his existing nuclear capability. "He puts it in mothballs with IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) inspectors on site 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. And in exchange, we provide him with $1.2 billion a year, which we label ‘foreign aid,' of course." The "foreign-aid" figure published in the newspapers was $400 million, which concerns Bueno de Mesquita. "I read that and I said, I hope that's not the deal because it's not enough money. He needs $1.2 billion, approximately, to sustain the loyalty of his cronies in the military and so forth. It's unpleasant, this is a nasty man, but we're stuck with it. The nice part of the deal is that it's self-enforcing. Each side has a reason to credibly commit to their part of the deal."

Recently, he's applied his science to come up with some novel ideas on how to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. "In my view, it is a mistake to look for strategies that build mutual trust because it ain't going to happen. Neither side has any reason to trust the other, for good reason," he says. "Land for peace is an inherently flawed concept because it has a fundamental commitment problem. If I give you land on your promise of peace in the future, after you have the land, as the Israelis well know, it is very costly to take it back if you renege. You have an incentive to say, ‘You made a good step, it's a gesture in the right direction, but I thought you were giving me more than this. I can't give you peace just for this, it's not enough.' Conversely, if we have peace for land-you disarm, put down your weapons, and get rid of the threats to me and I will then give you the land-the reverse is true: I have no commitment to follow through. Once you've laid down your weapons, you have no threat."

Bueno de Mesquita's answer to this dilemma, which he discussed with the former Israeli prime minister and recently elected Labor leader Ehud Barak, is a formula that guarantees mutual incentives to cooperate. "In a peaceful world, what do the Palestinians anticipate will be their main source of economic viability? Tourism. This is what their own documents say. And, of course, the Israelis make a lot of money from tourism, and that revenue is very easy to track. As a starting point requiring no trust, no mutual cooperation, I would suggest that all tourist revenue be [divided by] a fixed formula based on the current population of the region, which is roughly 40 percent Palestinian, 60 percent Israeli. The money would go automatically to each side. Now, when there is violence, tourists don't come. So the tourist revenue is automatically responsive to the level of violence on either side for both sides. You have an accounting firm that both sides agree to, you let the U.N. do it, whatever. It's completely self-enforcing, it requires no cooperation except the initial agreement by the Israelis that they are going to turn this part of the revenue over, on a fixed formula based on population, to some international agency, and that's that."

His first foray into forecasting controversy took place in 1984, when he published an article in PS, the flagship journal of the American Political Science Association, predicting who would succeed Iran's ruling Ayatollah Khomeini upon his death. He had developed a rudimentary forecasting model that was different from anything anyone had seen before in that it was not designed around one particular foreign-policy problem, but could be applied to any international conflict. "It was the first attempt at a general mathematical model of international conflict," he says. His model predicted that upon Khomeini's death, an ayatollah named Hojatolislam Khamenei and an obscure junior cleric named Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani would emerge to lead the country together. At the time, Rafsanjani was so little known that his name had yet to appear in the New York Times.

Even more improbably, Khomeini had already designated his successor, and it was neither Ayatollah Khamenei nor Rafsanjani. Khomeini's stature among Iran's ruling clerics made it inconceivable that they would defy their leader's choice. At the APSA meeting subsequent to the article's publication, Bueno de Mesquita was roundly denounced as a quack by the Iran experts-a charlatan peddling voodoo mathematics. "They said I was an idiot, basically. They said my work was evil, offensive, that it should be suppressed," he recalls. "It was a very difficult time in my career." Five years later, when Khomeini died, lo and behold, Iran's fractious ruling clerics chose Ayatollah Khamenei and Hashemi Rafsanjani to jointly lead the country. At the next APSA meeting, the man who had been Bueno de Mesquita's most vocal detractor raised his hand and publicly apologized to him.

Bueno de Mesquita had arrived, and so, too, had rational-choice theory. Rational choicers began sprouting up in political-science departments around the country and, say their critics, strangling anyone and anything in their way. By 2000, according to one estimate, some 40 percent of all articles published in the prestigious American Political Science Review were rational-choice themed. Increasingly, graduate students in political science viewed a fluency in formal mathematic modeling as a prerequisite for career advancement. And the leaps in technology taking place only fueled rational choice's advance: faster, more powerful computers allowed rational choicers to build bigger, ever more complex models that could be applied to ever more complex situations. And, naturally enough, an intellectual counteroffensive was launched.

It began in 1994 when two Yale political-science professors, Donald Green and Ian Shapiro, published their book, Pathologies of Rational Choice Theory, which disputed much of the scientific underpinnings that rational choice claimed for itself. In essence, the authors said that when rational choice was actually put to the practical test, much of it simply didn't work. This was followed by a 1999 (lightning speed in academia) article by Stephen M. Walt in the journal International Security called "Rigor or Rigor Mortis?" Walt, a political-science professor at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, conceded some value to formal modeling but ultimately likened rational choice to a "cult of irrelevance" that stifled creativity and had little practical value in actual policy formulation. Most vexing, Walt accused rational choicers of regarding nonrational choice theorists such as himself as "methodological Luddites whose opposition rests largely on ignorance."

Quote:

We found that [national intelligence] analyses, even when they were right, were vague compared to [Bueno de Mesquita's] forecasts. If you hit the target, that's great. But if you hit the bull's eye-that's amazing.-Stanley Feder, former CIA analyst

Since no one snaps a towel back harder than a scorned academic, Bueno de Mesquita and several of his rational-choice cohorts immediately mounted a blistering counter-counteroffensive, firing off a series of lengthy rebuttals to Walt's piece that deconstructed his criticism, questioned his facts, and cited what was in their view Walt's muddled logic as a prime example of why rational choice was so desperately needed in the field. "In the piece that Steve Walt wrote, in which he acknowledged that logical consistency was important, he also argued that it was overrated, that it stifled creativity. To me this is a bizarre idea," says Bueno de Mesquita, "because really what that statement means to me is, if you relax logical consistency, you can say whatever you feel like and therefore you are back to a world in which the study of politics is the expression of personal opinion instead of being political science. It's the art of politics or the articulation of beliefs, which is what dominates much of advising to government. It's rhetoric."

The brouhaha culminated at a raucous APSA meeting in 2001 at San Francisco's Hilton Hotel with the open revolt of a group of major-league political scientists who, one by one, took to the podium to rail against rational choice and its encroaching methodological orthodoxy. Dubbed the "Perestroika Movement" by its anonymous founder (apparently, rational-choice folk are a powerful and vindictive lot), the dissident group vowed to take a stand against "the domination of mathematical approaches to the discipline." There is a "hegemonic threat out there," warned John J. Mearsheimer, a noted professor of international relations at the University of Chicago. "This is about the mathematicization of political science," he said. "I'm in favor of filling the zoo with all kinds of animals. But I'm concerned about them running us out of the business or making us marginal." Ultimately, the Perestroikans did win some concessions: a new editor of the APSR who vowed to make the flagship journal more hospitable to mathematics-free articles and a pledge from the APSA to open up its method of appointing officers. "The APSA had become dominated by those practicing so-called rigorous analyses," says Walt. "Now the pendulum has swung back a bit."

For Bueno de Mesquita, getting his methodology accepted by the policy-making establishment remains somewhat of an uphill slog. The most pointed criticism of rational choice has been that, unlike with more traditional political scientists, very little cross-pollination takes place between rational-choice academics and government policy-makers. Bueno de Mesquita says it's just a matter of time before that changes. "Because people who are in a position to appoint people weren't trained in this way, they don't feel as comfortable as with people who were trained in what I would describe as a less rigorous form of study of politics. And, so, the folks who do more rigorous work typically don't get invited in," he says. Of course, the same was true of economics 40 years ago when nontechnical types like John Kenneth Galbraith dominated the field. Paul Samuelson and Milton Friedman changed all that, and Bueno de Mesquita sees himself playing the same role for politics.

Bueno de Mesquita remains unfazed, ever certain that rational choice will ultimately prevail. "When I moved to Rochester in 1973, if you wanted to be trained in this kind of political science, you could go to Rochester, period," he says. "Ten years later, you could go to Rochester, Caltech, and Washington University in St. Louis. If you asked me today, you could go to the places I just mentioned, and you could go to NYU, you could go to Stanford-there's a long list of places you could go. Except, of course, Harvard. But it will happen there, too. I'm on their syllabus."

Back to the Future

A sample of Bruce Bueno de Mesquita's wilder-and most accurate-predictions

Forecasted the second Intifada and the death of the Mideast peace process, two years before it happened.

Defied Russia specialists by predicting who would succeed Brezhnev. "The model identified Andropov, who nobody at the time even considered a possibility," he says.

Predicted that Daniel Ortega and the Sandanistas would be voted out of office in Nicaragua, two years before it happened.

Four months before Tiananmen Square, said China's hardliners would crack down harshly on dissidents.

Predicted France's hair's-breadth passage of the European Union's Maastricht Treaty.

Predicted the exact implementation of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement between Britain and the IRA.

Predicted China's reclaiming of Hong Kong and the exact manner the handover would take place, 12 years before it happened.

Photographs by Ethan Hill

If It Ain’t Broke...

GOOD — Mon, 1 Oct 2007 18:07:48 PDT

Technology has come a long way in the past 50 years, but some things still work better the old-fashioned way. GOOD brings you seven examples.

Prostitution

origins

Often called the world's oldest profession, the exchange of sex for money dates back to ancient Greece.

tools

Wit, charm, and sex appeal

Olivia Delamere, courtesan:

I've been a courtesan for a year now. So much has been written about what courtesans actually do, but most of it is a myth. I do get to travel a certain amount, and I do meet some very interesting people, but 80 percent of what I do is sex.

Courtesans have a long tradition. The word itself dates back to 16th-century Europe, where it was used to describe women who were high-class prostitutes or mistresses to wealthy men, but the concept dates back to the hetaeras of ancient Greece. Courtesans were skilled in intellectual, conversational, and artistic pursuits, and they enjoyed more power and freedom than many women of the time due to their independent resources. I'm a traditional courtesan in that I believe the role of a good courtesan goes beyond the purely physical. I also think modern courtesans are rated as much on their ability to perform sexually as they are on their intellectual and creative abilities. To put it bluntly, if you suck in the sack, then all the education, travel, and listening skills in the world aren't going to make you a good modern courtesan.

I think there will always be a demand for what we do. This is one of the few professions that's genuinely recession-proof, especially at the higher end. My clients are normal people, the vast majority of them are married, most are professional, and some are wealthy. I tend to appeal to a certain type of man-someone in his 40s or 50s who is erudite, charming, and usually not short of company; who is outwardly successful but perhaps inwardly a little lonely. For some, it's mainly about the sex and about a tryst without ties, for others it's about excitement and the frisson of a double life, and for others it's more about affection and warmth and companionship. Details of where we go are private, but suffice it to say that hotels feature prominently on my itinerary, as do more unusual locations. The wildest thing ever requested of me is subject to a confidentiality agreement, and the second-wildest one is unprintable. The third-wildest one was sex on a mountaintop. I not only did it, but I thoroughly enjoyed every minute of it!

Maggot Therapy

origins

This practice has a well-documented history both in Mayan and aboriginal cultures, as well as in Renaissance Europe. Its popular use in the States resurged in the late 1980s.

tools

Maggots

Pam Mitchell, maggot-therapy patient:

I'm a diabetic, and diabetes has its complications. I got a cut on my toe that didn't heal and got infected down to the bone. I had to go on an antibiotic IV for six to eight weeks, but it didn't work, so I had to have the tips of my big toe and the one next to it amputated. I was on all these antibiotics, all these creams, all these high-tech treatments. And they had me wearing these shoes that cut me, and that got infected, so I had to have surgery.

Quote:

They put 600 maggots in the hole in my heel, and then they put pantyhose over them so they wouldn't get out. Of course, they really don't want to once they start feasting.

When they do surgery, they cut away not only the bad tissue but also the good tissue. So I came out of surgery with a hole an inch deep and two inches around in the bottom of my heel. I had half an inch of exposed bone and a bone infection. I'm in the hospital for 10 days and they're telling me, "You'd better think about amputation." By chance, I called a friend, and she told me the only time she had ever watched The Learning Channel it was about maggot therapy, and I thought: "I'm going to ask my doctor about this."

We had to order the maggots from California. They send a jar of about 1,000 of them and you can't even see them without your glasses. They put 600 in the hole in my heel, and then they put pantyhose over them so they wouldn't get out. Of course, they really don't want to once they start feasting. At first, most people can't feel anything, but if you have pain in your wound to begin with, you will feel the maggots-they're actually doing microsurgery in there. You can feel them moving around. They're like puffed-rice when they come out. Then you can see them. They eat just the dead, infected tissue, they don't touch the good tissue, and they excrete enzymes to promote healing, and they also kill all the bacteria. It is better than anything that man can come up with.

Shoemaking

origins

Since roughly 1200 B.C., folks have made shoes, but shoemaking in its modern form was established in the second half of the 19th century, in England.

tools

Hides, lasts, and hand tools

Perry Ercolino, bespoke shoemaker:

I've been in business for myself for 27 years. In today's fast-paced world, I guess that's longevity to be proud of. I learned shoemaking from my father many years ago. The technology is basically the same today, still plodding along the way it always has.

The process starts with sitting down and talking to people. I ask what they need shoes for: Are they retired, are they still working, are they in the corporate world, are they traveling between countries, are they dealing with different cultures?

Then I trace the feet, both sitting and standing. I take a tape measure and run it along certain points of the foot. Once I have all of that charted we sit down and start talking about styles. Then I start to make a last pattern based on their foot profile and what I think will work. You've got to know how to design to make the shoe graceful and aesthetic, you have to know where to pinch and gather and whatnot. Each shoe requires about 50 hours of work by hand.

Things have gotten so cheapened up in the world because of mass production. I think that's why there's been this newfound gravitational pull toward these handmade items. There's definitely been an uptick in my business.

Will it last? I don't see anybody taking up this tradition, at least not in this country. No one wants to work trades anymore. Nobody has any concept of what this is all about. This is one of those professions that will go the way of the dinosaur. But there's nothing like it.

Beekeeping

origins

Evidence of honey harvesting dates back to 13,000 B.C., though sophisticated cultivation without destroying the hive or colony wasn't mastered until Lorenzo Langstroth received a patent for the movable comb hive in 1852. The technique has remained roughly the same ever since.

tools

Moveable frame hives, smoker, and protective clothing

Sharon Gibbons, beekeeper:

I started beekeeping because I was trying to feed my kids healthy foods, so we eliminated sugar and took up honey. At that point, I decided I should have my own hive, although I thought my husband was going to be the beekeeper. That quickly fell by the wayside, and I ended up with a couple of hives.

The basic idea of beekeeping is still the same as it was in the 1800s. The Langstroth hive is named after the scientist who first discovered what we called bee space-three eighths of an inch. That's their travel space, they won't junk it up with honey or anything. Beekeepers take advantage of that, and that's how the hives work. Most of us got into beekeeping because we're into healthy food and we don't want to fool with pesticides, but we've got some new diseases and mites that we didn't have 30 years ago that require treatments that most beekeepers hate. Other than that, it's pretty much the same.

I've been doing this since 1976, and now our business has close to 1,000 hives. There are 60,000 bees per colony, so that's 60 million bees. We make over 100,000 pounds of honey a year. I get stung any time I go out. I don't even notice it anymore. It's just a little prick.

Hanging

origins

Hanging became common in the 17th century. Today, it remains the most practiced form of judicial execution worldwide. Still legal in three states, the most recent U.S. hanging was performed in 1996.

tools

A gallows, a noose, a hood, and handcuffs

Steve Fielding, hangman expert and author of:

Hanging was abolished in the U.K. in the 1960s, but all executions by hanging around the world that use the U.K. method would be much like this: Hang-men were required to be at the prison at 4 p.m. on the day preceding the execution to view the prisoner and be given details of their height and weight, which were crucial to the hangman's calculations. Once the hangman had calculated the length of the drop, he would fill a sandbag to the same weight as the condemned, attach it to the noose, and test the apparatus. The bag would be left to stretch the rope overnight, and the hangman would retire to his quarters.

An hour or so before the execution, the hangman and his assistant would return to the execution chamber, detach the sandbag, reset the trapdoors, secure the noose in position with cotton thread so that it hung at head height and finally make a chalk mark in the shape of a "T" across the trapdoors where the prisoner would line up his toes. The assistant would help the executioner secure the prisoner's hands behind his back and then escort the convict the 10 or so paces to the trapdoors. Here the assistant would drop to his knees and secure a strap around the prisoner's ankles while the hangman placed a white linen bag over the prisoner's head before placing the noose, adjusting it into position. Once all was ready he would push the lever and the man would drop to his death. The average time for execution would be around 10 seconds.

Letterpress Printing

origins

The movable-type printing process was perfected by Johannes Gutenberg circa 1450.

tools

Lead or wood type, ink, paper, printing press

Julie Belcher and Kevin Bradley, printers at Yee-Haw Industries:

No matter how much you finesse that Macintosh, there's no warmth of the human touch coming through it. What separates us from the pack is that we know how to carve type and we know how to draw type. But we don't use the computer in the process. It's all hand-carved blocks. Real letterpress is lead type, wood type, and wood blocks. It's what Gutenberg printed the Bible with, and we keep it real.

Everything is backward in letterpress. You set up a form in reverse and it prints forward. It's all relief printing, so the pieces that are raised, that's what the roller hits and inks up. The places that are carved away or that are the negative space the ink doesn't hit.

There's beauty in being able to arrive in the morning and take these pieces and put them together like a little

puzzle, mix up the color ink you want, pick the kind of paper you want, and then

by the afternoon you've made something.

We're always on the fence, and the business is always changing. But there is always demand out there for a handmade product, something that's essentially art. Every time we do it we think, "Who else would be crazy enough to carve a wood block in 2007, and use 200-year-old type?" And we feel really good about that.

Ship Towing

origins

The first towing vessel, the Charlotte Dundas, made its maiden voyage in 1802.

tools

Tugboat

Adam Graves, Mate, McAllister Towing:

I'm on watch from midnight to six in the morning, and then on again from noon to six at night. The boat runs 24 hours, so I live on the boat. We're two weeks on, two weeks off. Sometimes I get a little crazy on the boat, really wanting to get off, but you can't beat having a two-week vacation every month.

In my 12 hours, we probably do eight to 15 ships. We meet the inbound ships out by the Verrazano Bridge at the entrance to New York harbor, and then we follow them to the dock. The average-sized container ship is 965 feet (that's the biggest ship that can fit in the Panama Canal), and they really wouldn't be able to maneuver to the dock or away from the dock without us. It's a game of leverage. If you can get to the furthest points of the ship, you have the most effect on it.

The tugboat I'm on is a 4,000 horsepower tractor tug. It's not like the old tugs because it has these drives that spin 360 degrees, which make the boat highly maneuverable. I've also worked on old single-screw tugboats, which is a completely different ballgame: Everything has to be planned out with the winds and tides because you're so much less maneuverable. That's how they used to do it back in the old days. But the ships weren't nearly as big then.

Animals Do It Better

Four jobs Mother Nature does best

truffle-hunting pigs The traditional truffle hunt, or cavage, has long been the work of portly, female swine. Their snouts can sniff out truffles covered in mud and dirt-partly because the tasty tubers smell like the sex hormones of male pigs. Bon appétit!

silkworms Animal-rights activists bemoan the harvesting of silk, but the mulberry-tree silkworm has been cultivated for more than 5,000 years. Since it no longer exists in the wild, to stop using it for silk production would be to eradicate the species.

firefighting sheep Especially helpful during unexpected dry spells, U.S. Forest Service sheep will graze so relentlessly that they can entirely eliminate fields of the dry brush and grasses that might otherwise become fodder for massive wildfires.

leeches Though they're no longer the miracle cure that our ancient, medieval, and Victorian predecessors thought them to be, leeches are still useful in surgeries that require clotting inhibitors and increased blood flow. Their anticoagulant even has a natural anesthetic.

Get a Life

Morgan Clendaniel — Mon, 1 Oct 2007 17:40:09 PDT

"Dude, did you lose your dick?"

That is the first thing anyone says to me in Second Life. I am standing naked in a bordello, conspicuously lacking the cartoonish satyr-like genitalia sported by the other male patrons. I have come here with visions of a place where I will no longer be hindered by the chafing constraints of our physical world. Here, I can fly, I can walk through cities wielding a giant sword, I can be the kind of guy who goes to sex clubs. But first, apparently, I have to find a penis.

As it turns out, they don't come standard and they don't come cheap. In Second Life, unless you want to look like a standard-issue avatar, you have to buy modifications to your physical appearance using Linden dollars, the in-world currency (right now a little less than $5 will get you 1,000 Linden dollars, 200 of which will get you a rudimentary penis). Not wanting to pay through the nose for something that should already be attached to my body, I decide to finance my phallus by turning to some underground activity. I head to one of Second Life's many casinos for a game of high-stakes poker, and swiftly lose all my money. Sure, the French girl with a garter belt and enormous breasts sitting next to me makes it hard to focus, but she is nothing compared to the man with little green fairies flying around his head. They are quite distracting.

In most places in Second Life, your avatar can fly. Here I am floating over a recreation of a Danish village. Complete with free bicycles.

It's only been a few hours and Second Life is already a bit of a letdown. Of course it's thrilling to buy a helicopter for less than a dollar, but I feel oddly constrained here. I don't have a penis, which means no virtual sex, and feeling broke is a feeling I'd like to escape from, not to.

And I'm not the only one having problems. Since San Francisco-based Linden Lab launched it in 2003, Second Life has enjoyed enormous growth, and has been widely heralded as the future of the internet. More recently, though, things seem to have taken a turn for the worse. Several major real world businesses set up shop in Second Life last year, but some companies have since quietly pulled out, perhaps noticing the same trend I did: a less-than-critical mass of Second Lifers pretty much everywhere I went. And even though $1 million changes hands daily in Second Life, the economy-judging from my difficulty finding an affordable penis-appears to be less a new way for businesses to reach their consumers, and more of a way for people with a little skill at using Second Life's programming code to make a few quick bucks in the cock market.

I don't find such an entrepreneur, though, instead copping my organ from a kindly vendor who has made a variety of sex-related body parts available for free. I am finally a virtual man, and I'm bored out of my mind.

I stopped by the poorly-designed and conspicuously empty Second Life headquarters of of John Edwards's campaign.

So is this the future? Since it launched, Second Life has been hailed as a glimpse of how we will someday interact, shop, and even live. With email and online shopping now commonplace, virtual worlds are the new cutting edge of online business and buzz. "In many ways, Second Life is the next step of the internet," says Jeska Dzwigalski, a community manager with Linden. "[In the future], having a virtual presence will be as ubiquitous as mobile phones or email addresses or a web page is today. It's the evolution of the internet." Right now there are almost 9 million accounts, but at even at peak times (4 p.m. Eastern-presumably, the most avid users don't have jobs) there are only 40,000 users logged on. That means the future of the internet is only grabbing enough people to fill a baseball stadium. While that number has been slowly growing, think about this: If just a little under 1 million users have logged in during the last 30 days, that means there are 8 million others who tried Second Life and haven't felt any need to come back.

The paradox of a virtual world is that it adds human interaction to the online experience, while at the same time making sure you never have to actually interact with anyone. Now, instead of merely buying a book on a website, you can browse a virtual bookstore along side other virtual patrons, without ever leaving your home. This logic-that you'd want to give up both the speed of online shopping and the social experience of actually shopping, that you'd want to spend time in a bookstore but not actually go to one-is depressing, to say the least. From there, it's a small step to buying only virtual clothes for your virtual self while you sit at home in your underwear (which some people no doubt already do). The only thing you can't get here is real-life sustenance, but with enough restaurants that deliver, you could conceivably never log out. What a future it could be.

I stumbled upon this eerie pirate ship just a stone's throw away from an area dedicated to raising awareness about Darfur.

Of course, the idea of a virtual world that regular people can wire into is an old trope of science fiction, from William Gibson's seminal book Neuromancer to the Hollywood blockbuster The Matrix. Modern online worlds like Second Life are greatly inspired by Neal Stephenson's bestselling 1992 book Snow Crash-where the now-universal term "avatar" was first popularized-which features a fully realized virtual world, called the metaverse (it also has cyborg dogs, so you get the idea). Second Life's version of the "metaverse" is slightly less functional than Stephenson's. Still, it's the biggest, most mainstream step toward a true virtual world operating parallel to our own.

Many people expected the possibilities of this virtual world to be embraced: a recent Harvard class took place in Second Life, Reuters has a news bureau and a reporter there, and some companies have even started using it as a way for employees in different locations to have staff meetings. Just recently, Second Life launched new code that allows users with microphones to really talk to each other, instead of just typing. And as more and more people become willing to convert their money to Linden dollars, businesses have been rushing to join in. Last year, the The New York Times noted that Second Life was "fast becoming a three-dimensional test bed for corporate marketers," and Linden Labs has picked up high-profile investors like Amazon.com's Jeff Bezos and eBay's Pierre Omidyar.

But businesses in Second Life aren't doing very well. Many are eating the losses of paying designers to create lavish headquarters for them, and leaving altogether. Dzwigalski says that businesses are simply going about it the wrong way: "Businesses that have done it really well have worked with the community to build a place where people come and interact with each other. The problem happens when you just throw up that building and expect everyone to come just because you're there. Some of the confusion is people exploring a new space and not knowing how to use it as a tool to extend their brand."

This is a sculpture of a giant cat. Things like this are not uncommon.

American Apparel opened a Second Life store last year-selling virtual versions of their real-world clothes-to much fanfare. The store is now deserted, and you can't find it in Second Life's search function, but you can still visit, and see the padlocked doors (to protect their leftover virtual inventory?). American Apparel released a statement saying simply that it felt its time was up.

Businesses are shuttering in Second Life, it seems, because no one is using them. There were never any employees at stores like Dell and Reebok when I visited, nor were there any customers. But that wasn't that shocking because, for the most part, there seems to be no one in Second Life at all.

As with other kinds of anonymous web activity, here you'll find the bulk of people in the thousands of areas devoted to virtual sex. "That's the nature of being human, more than the technology," says Dzwigalski. "Whenever you get people together, they're going to form relationships." Officially, the number of users in "mature" areas is around 5 percent, she says, but this seems hard to believe. Nearly 40 percent of the most popular user-rated places in Second Life are rated "mature," and, frankly, virtual sex is the first thing that comes to mind when you think of a virtual world.

This island replicates Gor, a world depicted in a series of fantasy novels in which all women serve as sex slaves. The residents don't appreciate it when you don't dress the part.

Second Life sex, meanwhile, doesn't fail to impress. Avatars can do impressively acrobatic things to each other, and a new industry, known as teledildonics, has sprung up: sex toys that can be programmed to corres-pond in real life to what is happening to your avatar online. But unenhanced virtual sex is much simpler. It involves clicking on small, ball-shaped buttons that then animate your avatar. You might click on a blue ball, labeled, say, "man on top," causing your avatar to assume the position and thrust excitedly. Hopefully, at the same time, a lovely female avatar has clicked on the corresponding pink ball, and is there to complete the act-if not, you'll just hump the floor for a while. I imagine that while their avatars go at it, the two players are privately messaging each other with content that's more exciting than the image of two naked animated people. I say "imagine" because there never seemed to be any available women for me to try it out with; perhaps sex in Second Life is more real than I could hope for.

Certainly sex isn't the only draw in Second Life. I notice five avatars having a wonderful conversation while walking through a masterly recreation of a quaint Danish village, and devout Second Life users passionately defend the nonsexual parts of their world. "It's a social networking site, just like MySpace or Facebook, only far more interesting," says a strapping avatar named Odin Flanagan, whom I meet while lounging on the side of a volcano. "I've had political discussions, typing about issues with people all over the world." Granted, he's chatting to a female avatar he met while she was dancing for Linden-dollar tips at a club ("A dancer, not a stripper," she makes clear). When I ask her why she doesn't just meet people in real life, I get the verbal equivalent of a withering stare: "Have you ever been to Oklahoma?"

Here I am, the proud owner of a new, comically large, constantly erect penis.

Having put my more prurient interest aside, I continue to explore the rest of the vast archipelago that is Second Life. To get from one "island" to another, you search for what kind of island you're looking for-"sex" turns up thousands of options, of course; other words, far fewer. I decide to ride a train, I smoke some virtual marijuana from Flanagan that makes my avatar fall over every third toke (a virtual mushroom, meanwhile, has no effect), I sit atop a strange copy of the statue David, I visit a biker strip club through which a bald eagle flies every three minutes, I try unsuccessfully to pilot a go-kart, I windsurf, I watch a near-riot as only three members of a Kiss cover band show up for their scheduled concert. My interactions consist, for the most part, of the bare minimum of conversation, and when they do, it's often like reading your little sister's unintelligible text messages. Something fun and social must be happening in Second Life, but it certainly isn't happening where I am.

I stumble onto a Japanese-themed island, standing out among the costumed samurai in my standard-issue jeans and white T-shirt, when a young Japanese girl in a short skirt begins swordfighting with me. She is a member of a "clan" that gathers to practice Second Life swordfighting techniques, she says. She defeats me mercilessly a few times before taking pity on me with a lengthy tutorial. I am totally engrossed, but when our lesson is over, I am left sitting on the couch, having spent two hours in the dark fake swordfighting with a strange person who may have been (but probably was not) a very hot Japanese girl.

The padlocked American Apparel has been removed from Second Life's search engine.

I'm no Luddite. I'll happily send an email to avoid a phone call. I play computer games online. But something about this seems off. It's one thing to hang out in your perfect fantasy world, but it's strange to walk into someone else's and make yourself comfortable. Second Life is the ideal place for people like the little samurai girl who want to live out a fantasy that is totally unfeasible in the real world, and it gives them their fantasy in a magical, often breathtaking way. But don't count on a time when you'll actually go to the virtual world for things you can find right outside your door. For one thing, in the real world, penises are free.

Low-Tech Laboratory

Tim McKeough — Mon, 1 Oct 2007 16:25:03 PDT

MIT's D-Lab can turn a plastic baby bottle into lab equipment and refashion a toilet as a chlorination system. Here's how its low-cost, low-tech solutions are saving lives around the world.

MIT is often thought of as a high-tech clubhouse, a play space for brilliant thinkers who churn out one world-changing innovation after the next. MIT brainiacs have brought us everything from vital advances in high-speed photography and internet architecture to robots with artificial intelligence. But not all of their solutions are mind-numbingly complex. What use is an electrical invention if you live in a community that doesn't have the reliable power to use it, or a fragile device in an area where it's almost impossible to find spare parts?

MIT's D-Lab, an elite unit of low-tech mercenaries, addresses these concerns with solutions that dramatically affect the quality of people's lives in developing countries. "Our goal is always to do things in the simplest way possible," says D-Lab's director, Amy Smith, a mechanical engineer who won the prestigious Lemelson-MIT Student Prize for Invention in 2000 (she was the first woman to do so), and a MacArthur "genius"grant in 2004. "Designs are more likely to be successful if they're not complicated and requiring all sorts of support and infrastructure. But simple doesn't mean easy. It's a challenge to get to those ‘simple' solutions."

She first realized that a skilled engineer could do a world of good in the developing world during the late 1980s, when she spent four years with the Peace Corps in Botswana. Now at D-Lab, Smith and an ever-changing roster of students develop no-nonsense technology for people in places like Honduras, Haiti, Brazil, India, and Zambia. Some of their inventions are already spreading through communities by word of mouth, while others are being studied by partner organizations for broader distribution. "We're not as well equipped to do dissemination as we would like," says Smith, who notes that D-Lab only has about 30 students at any one time. "We're interested in finding the right partners to move the technologies forward."

Water Chlorination Controller

what it does

Makes drinking water safe by tweaking faulty chlorination systems

where it's in use

Honduras

When students from a D-Lab team visited a village in Honduras in 2004, they were soon alerted to a problem with the local water supply. The community stored its water, which was piped in from a spring, in a large holding tank. A smaller connected tank of chlorine solution was supposed to drip into the holding tank at a steady rate, but the valve managing the chlorine was not doing its job-sometimes it added too much, other times, not enough.

Working with the local plumber, the D-Lab team found inspiration in the unlikeliest of places-the flush toilet. With supplies that cost just a few dollars from the local pharmacy and hardware store-a plastic gas container, the clamp from an intravenous drip, and a float valve normally used in toilets-they had all the materials they needed. They used the gas can as a reservoir for the chlorine before it was released into the water supply; the float valve ensured that the reservoir was kept filled at a nearly constant level. As the reservoir emptied, the float opened a valve to refill it, just like in a toilet. The pressure on the intravenous clamp, which was attached to the bottom of the gas can, was therefore kept constant, creating a steady, reliable flow of chlorine solution-and safer water. "When we went back the following year, the man we had worked with had trained several other technicians from neighboring villages," says Smith. "The solution spread to five other communities, then 13, and now it's close to 50."

Screenless Hammermill

what it does

Processes flour through aerodynamics

where it's in use

Senegal, Haiti, Lesotho

Turning grain into flour requires a surprising amount of force. When done by hand, it takes about half an hour to process a kilogram of flour; when done by a motorized hammermill, it takes about a minute. Many communities in developing countries have access to conventional hammermills, which pulverize grains, but there's a severe design problem: The machines rely on a fragile screen to separate the flour from the larger waste particles, and those screens frequently get clogged and break. Replacement screens are expensive, if they can be acquired at all, so the mills often end up sitting unused.

While still a student at MIT, Smith addressed this problem, designing a screenless hammermill. Others had tried to create such a machine before, but with limited success. After studying the airflow in mills, Smith devised a system that allowed fine particles (the flour) to be blown into a collector, while larger particles remained inside the mill. Over the following years, D-Lab helped test the design in Senegal, where crafts people built the machines with local tools and materials. The result? A reliable screenless mill that can be built and repaired locally, uses about 70 percent less electricity, and costs a quarter of the price.

Low-Cost Water Test

what it does

Hacks expensive water testing systems to offer an affordable alternative

where it's in use

Haiti, Honduras, Pakistan

Communities in developing countries may have access to water, but they often can't tell whether or not it's safe to drink. Water-testing devices that use replaceable filters to check for dangerous bacteria are available; but they cost a relative fortune, anywhere from $800 to $1,200. Since the filter paper-not the lab equipment-is the most important part of the kits, the D-Lab team set out to find a low-cost replacement for the equipment. They found it in plastic baby bottles.

The mouths of baby bottles turned out to be only a few millimeters wider than the circular filter papers, so with a few tweaks, the team was able to customize the bottles for their own purposes. A disposable, sterile bottle insert holds the water that will be tested (without contaminating the bottle, so it can be reused), and the filter paper is placed on top, sandwiched between washers, which are held in place by the screw-top cap. The bottle is then turned upside down, and the water is sucked through the filter by a syringe attached to the bottle's spout. Once removed, the filter is placed in a petri dish and left to process in an incubator for 24 hours. D-Lab students are already using the invention in the field; the kit has an up-front cost of just $10, and individual tests cost only a few cents each.

Phase-Change Incubator

what it does

Creates a warm environment to test for bacteria

where it's in use

Haiti, Honduras, Pakistan

Inexpensive water tests are of little use if you don't have an incubator in which to process them. Electric incubators are normally used to hold samples at 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit (the temperature of the human body) for 24 hours, in order to check for the growth of harmful bacteria. The problem is that the communities that lack clean water and conventional water-testing systems are the same communities that usually don't have reliable electricity to run an incubator. Portable, battery-powered models are available, but cost $1,500 to $2,500, and tend to be fragile.

Finding yet another work-around, one of Smith's earliest inventions was the phase-change incubator, which is used by D-Lab students and officials in host countries to test local water supplies. It is also being considered for possible vaccine trials in Pakistan. It's essentially a small, portable cooler of the sort you might use for family picnics, but instead of food, it holds plastic balls filled with chemicals that have a melting point of about 99 degrees Fahrenheit. To fire up the incubator, people just have to leave the balls out in the sun, or heat them in hot water, until the chemical inside melts. The balls-which will remain at the correct temperature for a full day-are re-turned to the insulated cooler, along with water tests in petri dishes.

Alternative Charcoal

what it does

Uses local waste to create cleaner cooking fuels

where it's in use

Ghana, Haiti, India

Another serious, surprising problem in developing countries is indoor air pollution caused by cooking fires, which can lead to serious ailments and death. D-Lab, working in Haiti-where firewood harvesting has led to heavy deforestation-set out to find an alternative fuel source that didn't require wood and didn't cause respiratory damage. After a false start with recycled paper, the team members turned to bagasse, waste left over from the processing of sugarcane that was previously considered worthless. They were able to carbonize this material by sealing it in a low-oxygen, heated environment-a makeshift kiln constructed from an oil drum. After creating charcoal particles from the bagasse, they went in search of a binder that would allow them to make proper briquettes. They found their answer in a sticky porridge known as konkonte, which is made from cassava flour and also appens to be a perfectly combustible glue.

The finished charcoal briquettes can be formed by hand, but D-Lab has also been developing low-cost briquette-making devices that compress the material and produce tidy pucks. The final product burns longer and cleaner than wood-based charcoal, delivering environmental, health, and economic benefits (the surplus briquettes can be sold). The World Bank is sponsoring a broader pilot project in Haiti this year, and a team of MIT students is working to commercialize the technology and deliver it across the country. The concept has also been exported to India, where people use wheat and rice straw, and to Ghana, where they are carbonizing corncobs. It will soon be introduced in Tanzania, Pakistan, and Brazil.

You’ve Got Mail!

Matt Schwartz — Mon, 1 Oct 2007 14:58:46 PDT

At the bottom of the Grand Canyon, the insular Havasupai tribe still gets its mail delivered the hard way-on the back of a mule. We saddled up to see how almost three tons of groceries and 17 pounds of letters get to their remote destinations.

Charlie Chamberlain wants a raise. He makes a strong case for it, too, recalling a day 15 years ago when his job brought him a few feet away from death. He had gotten up before dawn, as he did every day, to lead his mules up the steep eight-mile trail, load them up, then head back down to the village. By the time he reached the dry creek bed at the foot of the trail, in early afternoon, the sky had clouded over. This was not unusual-late summer is monsoon season in Arizona-but when Charlie saw the first raindrops, big fat raindrops the size of silver dollars, he began to worry. Soon dark pools of rain formed on the soaked earth, so Charlie, on horseback, led the mules to higher ground. Up the rocky hillside, the trail had become a wide canal, pinning him against the high canyon walls. His horse shivered and whined, the water rising past its hooves, then its knees. When it splashed against the soles of his boots, Charlie began to pray.

A member of the Havasupai tribe stands with a mule named Skid Row.

Strapped to the wet and trembling backs of his animals was the precious cargo that had gotten Charlie into this tight spot-not rifles nor furs nor gold bullion. The mules were carrying a few dozen plastic bins marked "United States Postal Service." For 25 years, Charlie, one of the 34 USPS contractors known as "packers," has delivered mail this way, to the Havasupai tribe here at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. Most of the other packers are tribe members who live in a village with no paved roads, no streetlights, and frequent power outages, home to 450 Native Americans living in the most remote human settlement in the lower 48 states. It is a day's journey away from the nearest supermarket, but since 1896, the village, Supai, has had its own post office. And today, just as it was 100 years ago, the most efficient machine for moving cargo down treacherous, boulder-strewn terrain is the mule.

"We lay our lives on the line every time we pack the mail," says Chamberlain, whose son Brian is also a packer. Flash floods are only one of the job's dangers. When tied together, mules can "jam" and "wreck" like cars. In the summer, when temperatures at the bottom of the canyon reach as high as 120 degrees, tired mules will sometimes lie down, roll over, and die. Or they fall off switchbacks and plunge hundreds of feet to their doom, forcing the packers to climb down, retrieve the mail, and cremate the body. In an age when purchases seem to magically appear on our doorsteps, the trail to Supai is a reminder of the supply chain, where the convenient pleasures of Netflix and Amazon.com are won in a daily contest between man and nature.

Quote:

The mule train is a symbol of universal service at a reasonable rate. A private company would say, ‘You want me to deliver to the bottom of the Grand Canyon because there's an Indian tent down there? Sure, for $20 a letter.' We do it for 41 cents.-Dennis Palandro, USPS

The postal literature generally presents the Havasupai as a lost tribe of innocent natives trapped by high canyon walls in a perpetually prehistoric Shangri-la. The mule train is their thin thread of life, the tribe's only means of procuring food and interacting with the outside world. The village I observed is much more complicated, as is its relationship to the Postal Service. The mule train has a large economic impact here, giving between 30 and 40 men steady work in a village where only one in four is employed. Supai is neither quaintly premodern, nor utopian, nor completely dependent on the mail. Spread out between stands of corn and grazing horses, the tribal dwellings are contemporary, single-story prefabs. The houses have satellite dishes. The children drink soda like it's water and listen to iPods. In the tribe's very modern community center, people shop for sneakers online and download images of dead rap stars.

Several of the USPS delivery mules wait at the trail head. All told, they carry up to three tons of mail to the bottom of the Grand Canyon.

What straddles these two worlds is the USPS, which moves 213 billion pieces of mail each year, from any address to any other address across a 3,000-mile-wide continent. It employs 700,000 workers, more than any U.S. business other than Wal-Mart, and it somehow manages to break even, despite constraints that no private corporation has to face. Unlike FedEx and UPS, it cannot pick the most profitable areas of coverage, and it is obliged, under federal law, to provide daily pickups and deliveries to every community in the nation. "We go to extremes to make that happen," says Postmaster Terry Misenheimer, who routes the Supai mail from the town of Peach Springs.

The mules are just one of many unorthodox techniques that the USPS uses to get the mail through. Some rural Alaskans get their mail carried overland by snowmobile or dropped from a seaplane. In the Florida Everglades, the mail arrives on a boat propelled by outboard motor. In Philadelphia and other big cities, much of the mail is sorted by robots, giant claws that seize a tray of mail, scan the barcode, and shuttle it with terrifying speed to any one of 12 bins to await distribution. No peacetime organization in the world deploys such a wide range of technologies to accomplish a single job.

Quote:

No peacetime organization in the world deploys such a wide range of technologies to accomplish a single job.

But, like any organization of great size and venerable age, the postal system is resistant to change. Critics have long predicted its demise as society becomes increasingly paperless. The post office has responded with numerous congressional hearings and special presidential commissions. There have also been half-baked innovations like E-COM (a post-office based flyer-printing service) and specially USPS-certified electronic mail. Meanwhile, fax machines, FedEx, and email have steadily chipped away at the post office's more profitable business-First Class mail. Volume has fallen 6 percent since 2001. Standard mail, used mostly by direct marketers, has risen 14 percent, leading many recipients to toss away the better half of their mail unopened.

These changes pose little threat to the old Supai mule train. In fact, they may help ensure that the post office will keep the route around, a memento of the days when mail was a necessity. Hank Delaney, the route's lead contractor, has taken calls from a marketing agency that wants the mules to join curbside R2-D2s and Forever stamps. "The mule train is a symbol of universal service at a reasonable rate," said Dennis Palandro, the foreman who proudly showed me Philadelphia's robotic arms. "A private company would say, ‘You want me to deliver to the bottom of the Grand Canyon because there's an Indian tent down there? Sure, for $20 a letter.' We do it for 41 cents. And if they move to New York, the mail follows them all the way there. For nothing! Who else is going to do that?"

The route begins in Peach Springs, a town of 600 nestled between two low hills on the barren floodplains of Arizona. The post office, a one-story structure the color of pinkish earth, looks to be the very prototype of dull and reliable rural service. But this morning, just after seven, it is bustling with activity. A driver from Shamrock Foods wheels crates of perishables down a ramp from his truck to a loading area where four young men in baseball caps bind them together with packing tape. Terry Misenheimer, a laconic, red-haired man, weighs each parcel on a blue floor scale, meters out Standard Mail postage, and slaps it on the boxes. With the application of a small white sticker, the food is transformed into mail. Seventy-two cans of 7Up and root beer: $16.30. Fifty pounds of kitchen salt: $15.47. Fifteen dozen eggs: $12.97. "What are you writing down?" he barks at me. The USPS office absorbs a considerable loss on the Supai mail route; Terry is shy about numbers. "Just the mail," I tell him. There are cases of bottled water, Sunny Delight, frozen hamburger patties, jugs of frying oil, and prewashed pinto beans. Almost all of the mail in today's 6,500-pound load is edible.

As I prep for my ride down the trail, Larry Moore, the tall and beefy contractor who drives the mail from Peach Springs to the edge of the canyon, teases me about the flash floods. "I hope you brought your swimming trunks," he says. "We got a big ol' hoss waiting for you. I hear he loves to buck." He tells me the story of one packer, Sun Eagle, who rode through a flash flood last week. "He said the water was up to his stirrups!" says Larry pantomiming the rising water. "His mules were huffing and shaking! Somehow he kept them all in line." Did the mail make it intact? "Of course," says Larry. He seems slightly offended that I'd even ask. "The mail always goes through."

It is all on Larry's trailer now, almost three tons of food and supplies plus 17 pounds of letters. I follow behind, driving 10 minutes up Route 66 and then turning left onto the patchy two-lane road that leads to Hualapai Hilltop. We ascend a high ridge, passing a couple of trailers, a twelve-point elk, the charred shell of an abandoned school. Suddenly, as we cross the top of the hill, the canyon appears on the horizon, a band of taupe sandstone around a ribbon of empty space. Soon we arrive at a parking lot overlooking the canyon. Every few minutes we pass another hiker, dazed from the three-hour ascent. At the far end is the trailhead, where half a dozen packers are waiting for us. They drink Gatorade and chat in their native tongue. Most wear baggy jeans, sneakers, and headphones. Beside them, some 40 mules (and several horses) are tied up to a long hitch of red pipe.

Larry lays the mail out on the ground for the packers to load onto their animals, roping the boxes around two "mule trees"-wooden braces that lie along the mules' backs and look like miniature skateboard decks-and piling as much as 150 pounds onto each animal. Claude Watahomigie, a veteran packer, will be guiding me down. Thirty-five years old, he is slightly built and soft-spoken. He wears a silver rodeo buckle studded with pieces of raw turquoise. Larry gives him the paper mail: two light white bags and one Priority parcel. I ask Claude whether he ever gets his own mail early. "No," he chuckles, shaking his head. "Federal offense."

The USPS maintains a team of 40 mules which service the eight-mile Havasupai mail route.

"These mules have built-in shock absorbers," says Anthony, another packer, showing off his animals' legs. "They can take eggs, ripe peaches, anything." Because of the rocky terrain, Anthony says, the mules get new shoes every three or four weeks. This makes plenty of work for the village farriers, one of whom happens to be a few feet away, loading tools into the back of his pickup. Before I can ask a question he approaches me and asks me for written permission from the tribal council to be on the reservation. I have permission, I tell him, but no letter. He goes on a brief rant about a group of archaeologists who appeared one day in the village without authorization. "You're just like them," he says, "digging stuff up, looking for information. You're why I live out in the woods. Nobody around, no noise, no bother. No people like you, making me curious." He abruptly turns his back.

I walk back to Claude. He has finished loading his mules and tying them, nose-to-tail, into a string 10 beasts long. He sets me atop a white male. "His name is Hidelgo, the Survivor." The name gives me little comfort as Hidelgo lurches down the narrow trail, his hooves slipping on the loosely packed gravel and broken rocks. As we twist around each switchback, his nose sticks out over the abyss like the lead car on a rollercoaster. My life is in this animal's hands, and only now do I realize that I weigh 15 pounds more than his maximum mail load. "Don't worry," Claude reassures me. "He's handling himself just fine."

The trail reaches the bottom of the canyon and flattens out, weaving between hills dotted with sagebrush. Claude talks to his mules with a fluttering, bird-like whistle and a few clucks of the tongue. He explains: "I'm just letting them know I'm here, that everything's okay." I ask him how long he's lived in Supai. "My whole life," he says. Does he ever think of leaving? "Never. Who would take care of my animals?" A red seam opens up between two hills and we enter it. The earth cracks and the trail descends, forming two high walls of red stone. As we go down, Claude tells me each part of the trail's name: Bear Chases Man, then Halfway, then the Gambler's Place, where, as tribal legend has it, a giant rock crushed a group of dice-players. As we descend further, I see pools of water from last week's rain, now home to swarms of black tadpoles. The only sign of trouble is the leg of a drowned horse. It sticks up from the ground like a crooked branch. "You see the purple down there?" Claude asks, pointing miles ahead to a shady bend in the canyon, where the shadows darken to lavender. "That's where we're going."

A train of USPS delivery mules en route to the Havasupai post office at the bottom of the grand canyon.

As the canyon trail descends it meets the waters of the Havasu Creek, from which the tribe takes its name. Dry semidesert becomes lush with willow, yucca, and cottonwood trees. The trail then turns and abruptly opens up into the village, where modern bungalows line 518 acres of nameless dirt roads and green fields surrounded by the towering sandstone walls of the canyon.

At least twice a week (and several times a day during the tourist season), a helicopter flies from the hilltop to the town square. The trip takes eight minutes and costs $25 for Havasupai, $85 for tourists. Many tribe members fly out on the weekends, drive to Kingman or Phoenix, and fly back in with a couple of bags of groceries. For larger loads, tribe members can have a 900-pound sling of cargo flown in for around $100.

"Ah, the flying horse," says Benji Jones, laughing, as the helicopter lands and another pair of tourists disembarks. Jones is thirty-something, a broad man with shoulder-length black hair. He is sitting with a friend who has flown in via helicopter to peddle reggae CDs. The mule train is his tribe's "main artery," Jones says, recalling how he used to order reggae music through the mail, inspiration for his old band, Tribal War.

Quote:

The [Havasupai] people are like a chameleon. We adapt as a survival tactic. But the other things, the CDs, boom boxes, Walkmans, the DVDs? They don't have no place out here.-Lonnie Manakaja, tribesman

Lonnie Manakaja compares the mail to bridles, rope, shovels, and horses-useful novelties that the tribe has woven into its culture. "The people are like a chameleon. We adapt as a survival tactic. But the other things," he adds, "the CDs, boom boxes, Walkmans, the DVDs? They don't have no place out here."

One former packer told me that the helicopter flights in particular had "spoiled" the tribe. "Packing is proud and traditional," he said. "I miss the good old days. Nobody rides horses no more." Well, not quite nobody. Several times during my visit I see two young boys riding barefoot and bareback down Supai's main street at a full gallop. They are cousins, Stallone and Rushawn Watahomigie, and they say they can't wait until they're old enough to be packers. "Riding horses is fun!" Rushawn exclaims, catching his breath from the ride. "They go fast!"

When Claude and I arrive at the town square there are five tribal workers with hand trucks waiting for us. It is approaching noon. Beneath the shady eaves of the town cafe, a few elders are chatting and a line of tourists waits for the helicopter to carry them back to their cars. Claude ties his string of mules to a weathered wooden post. "Okay, nice and tight," he says. After our breathtaking transit down the canyon, the delivery itself is anticlimactic. The edible portion of the mail is split up and wheeled to five destinations: the senior program, the Head Start program, the school, the cafe, and the general store, where prices are high due to the cost of shipping. A large box of Special K goes for $10.67. A Sharpie is priced at $14.77. A case of overripe strawberries didn't survive the trip down, so the store lays them out on a bench for all comers.

Mules sometimes fall off the trail and plunge to their death, forcing postal employees to climb down and retrieve the mail.

The next morning I walk over to the tribal office to introduce myself to the tribe's vice-chairman, who invited me. It turns out he is away and the chairman, Thomas Siyuja, has no idea I was coming. "If I see you talking to anyone about anything other than the mail, you're out of here," he warns. His wariness is understandable. Last year, the Havasupai were under intense scrutiny following the robbery and brutal murder of a Japanese tourist by a 18-year-old tribe member. One writer for an outdoors magazine described the village as a ghetto, rife with gangs and meth. Since then, the tribe has been extremely suspicious of outsiders. The 25,000 tourists who visit each year are tolerated for the revenue they bring in, but the tribe lives on a separate social plane. "I'd rather not be bothered" is the response I get from the more gracious of Supai's postal customers when I try to ask some questions. Others simply refuse to engage, staring over my shoulder until I go away.

Shirley Manakaja (no relation), a 47-year-old mother of eight, is Supai's postmaster. She has long black hair and dresses for work in a navy-blue T-shirt. She has lived most of her life in Supai and has worked in the post office since 1990. She says she enjoys dealing with the tourists and philatelic pilgrims who come seeking her office's commemorative postmark, but to her, having food packed on mule back seems routine.

"It's ordinary to me," she says. "Every city has a post office."

"Why mules?" I ask, looking for an elaboration on Terry's "best way to get the mail from Point A to Point B." "I dunno," she shrugs, covering her mouth with her hand and looking away, embarrassed and slightly amused. The only unusual thing, she says, is the occasional bottle of liquor that breaks on its way into the dry village. The would-be bootleggers arrive to pick up their contraband, only to find Bureau of Indian Affairs officers waiting for them.

Shirley does not want me to see the inside of the post office. "It's messy. We lost power for all of yesterday afternoon, and I haven't had time to clean up yet." Eventually she relents. Her office is a small, cluttered room adjoining the general store. Nearly every surface is covered with office supplies, old zipcode books, and mail. Besides a small plaque and an old tricolor mailbox, there is little to suggest the place it holds in United States postal lore. As the afternoon goes by, I watch Shirley sort mail and chat with her customers. The village has no ATM, and many Havasupai use Shirley's counter as a source of pocket cash, buying a stamp and charging $20 or $30 to their debit cards. After three in the afternoon, as Shirley finishes her daily sorting, the town square fills up with tribal members come to check their mail and exchange news. An elder tells me she's looking for her Social Security check; younger folks are picking up catalogue purchases and sending utility bills to nearby Valentine, Arizona.

I begin to sense that the tribe is not so different from millions of other postal customers-that they take the system for granted. Then I see an old man in a flannel shirt and cowboy hat. Shirley hands him a box, the very same craft-wrapped Priority box that I watched Claude carry down. He is beaming. He hobbles through the general store, speaking excitedly in Havasupai to anyone who will listen. What's in the box? I ask. "A blanket!" he says. "Fancy Indian blanket, from a friend." The gift has given him a surge of energy. He doesn't need any help carrying it home.