C OV ER S T ORY
F6 Sunday, June 5, 2011 • THE BULLETIN
Hunting down the baddest bugs By Allen Pierleoni McClatchy-Tribune News Service
Award-winning nature writer and National Public Radio regular Amy Stewart is on a firstname basis with some of the baddest bugs in the insect kingdom, as she shows in “Wicked Bugs” (Algonquin 288 pgs., $18.05). Combining dark humor, littleknown history and goosebump-inducing entomological fact, she takes on more than 100 of our flying, creeping and burrowing worst nightmares. I caught up with Stewart by phone at her home in Eureka, Calif., where she and her husband own Eureka Books antiquarian bookstore. Visit her at www.amystewart.com.
Q: A:
What is a wicked bug?
Something that poses a danger to us or has caused catastrophic damage to human affairs.
Q: A:
“Wicked Bugs” is a natural segue from your best-selling “Wicked Plants.” I hope so. People aren’t really afraid of plants, even though most plants have some way of defending themselves,
whether it’s a poison or thorns. But we’re terrified of bugs. It makes us jumpy to see some tiny little thing skittering around, and we don’t know where it’s headed next. For the most part, there is no reason to fear (bugs) at all. But it is reasonable to be afraid of the 100 or so in “Wicked Bugs.”
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What’s the most deadly of the wicked bugs? In terms of the number of people it has killed, the mosquito, which has been with us throughout our history. It’s a blood-sucker, so it transmits not only malaria but one of every five insect-transmitted diseases. About 500 million people suffer from malaria around the world every year. And it transmits a lot of diseases you’ve never heard of, like lymphatic filariasis, also called elephantiasis.
Q:
You write that typhusinfected body lice were largely responsible for stopping Napoleon’s army. What other insect has had such a dramatic effect? The boll weevil, which wiped out cotton crops, changed the course of history for the South. A lot of (plantations)
A:
were forced out of the cotton business, which strangely was a good thing. (Many plantations) had to grow peanuts instead, which turned out to be more profitable. (Flour) weevils were a huge problem for soldiers in the Civil War. They infested the hardtack the soldiers carried, their only portable food. So much so that the soldiers joked they didn’t have to carry their rations because their rations could walk on their own. Bedbugs had made headlines the past couple of years.
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They’re tough to eradicate.
The change from wooden beds to brass and iron beds was a response to bedbugs because the little cracks in the wood frames were places for them to hide. They couldn’t get a foothold on metal. Until World War II, having bedbugs was like having houseflies — they were ubiquitous. It was only when we started using really horrible chemicals that we wiped out bedbugs, along with everything else. Fortunately, we don’t use those chemicals anymore, so here they come again.
Q:
A lot of mythology surrounds the brown recluse spider.
A:
It’s found in about 16 states, but arachnologists from the University of California say there are no brown recluse spiders in California. They held a “show me the spider” challenge and invited people to send in what they believed to be brown recluses in exchange for a cash reward, and no one ever claimed the prize. A lot of things get misdiagnosed as brown recluse spider bites, but there are no verified deaths from them.
Q: A:
As a veteran gardener, what was your worst bug bite? Apart from some fire ants, some biting midges (nosee-ums) and a couple of bee stings, I’ve never had a devastating bug bite.
Q:
It’s said that only two things will survive a nuclear holocaust — Tupperware and cockroaches. I don’t see cockroaches going anywhere. They’re “wicked” (in that) they move germs around and can transmit diseases. They’re what’s called a “weed species,” one of those things that follows humans wherever we go. Cockroaches and houseflies love our garbage and are uniquely adapted to living around us. They have outsmarted us many times, and I think they will continue to do that.
A:
Author crunches the numbers in ‘Popular Crime’ “Popular Crime: Reflections on the Celebration of Violence” by Bill James (Scribner, 482 pgs., $30)
By Nathaniel Rich New York Times News Service
Fans of Bill James — baseball fans, in other words — will have many of their expectations confounded by his new book. For starters, unlike his previous two dozen or so volumes, “Popular Crime” has nothing to do with the statistical analysis of baseball. The title doesn’t refer to certain general managers’ criminal neglect of the many advanced statistics that James has popularized over the years, which are best known by terms like OPS, PSN, WAR and SecA. “Popular Crime” has nothing, in fact, to do with baseball. Its subject is our other national pastime: crime stories. As a James fan myself I was hoping for a new set of Jamesian terms, like STAB (Streetwalkers and Transients Assassinated per Borough), say, or OJs (Obstructions of Justice). And as it turns out there are a few. By the final chapter we are fluent enough in James’ methodology that we don’t flinch when he classifies the murder of JonBenet Ramsey as an “IQBX 9.” But the book is primarily a history of the murders that have obsessed American newspaper readers since Dec. 22, 1799, when the body of a young New York woman named Elma Sands was found floating in a well. Between vivid accounts of Lizzie Borden, the Boston Strangler and the Zodiac killer, James offers proposals for penal and judicial reform, theories about the cultural significance of crime stories and brief book reviews. He is aware that he has no professional background in any of these matters; he even reminds the reader of this fact compulsively, describing himself as “ignorant” and “an expert in nothing.” Often, after developing some hypothesis, he falls back into a cranky defensiveness: “That’s just my opinion; could be right, could be wrong.” There is something disingenuous about this pose; after all, his “ignorance” didn’t prevent him from writing a nearly 500-page book on the subject. James, who originally self-published his annual “Baseball Abstract,” the stathead’s holy grail, has always been proud of his outsider status; it is what allowed him to make observations that old-timers, drawing on decades of conventional wisdom, could not. Without having to worry about what might appeal to readers of popular sports publications, he was free to explore his obsessions and crack theories. It’s clear early on in “Popular Crime” that James, despite his protestations, is an expert. He’s read the syllabus, as well as the supplementary texts: more than a thousand true-crime books in all, he estimates. This may not make him a criminologist, but he understands the genre intimately. Popular crime stories, he writes, are Aristotelian tragedies, “in which a person of substance is reduced to ruin by a flaw in his/her character revealed under the tensions of the stage.”
As disturbing, for instance, as the case of the Menendez brothers might be, its fascination derives from the perverse knowledge that we can empathize not only with the victims but also, at some darker depth, the culprits. James is best when he applies his knife’s-edge empiricism to the murkiest of crime puzzles. A stern logician, he lays out his opponents’ arguments in list form, refuting each spurious claim and applying point totals to quantify a suspect’s perceived guilt. Readers of “Popular Crime” will be convinced that Lizzie Borden did not kill her parents, Albert DeSalvo was not the Boston Strangler, and John and Patricia Ramsey did not conspire to kill their daughter. This is where James faces his most challenging problem: Popular crimes, unlike baseball games, resist quantification. Crimes can
be quantified in the aggregate, but popular crimes are exceptional — the no-hitters of criminology. Their fame rests on their peculiarity. They often involve millionaires, celebrities and serial killers; they are also almost always unsolved. And so James often finds himself succumbing to a streak of antiempiricism that he would never tolerate among his fellow sabermetricians. His 100-point scale, while admirable in its effort to weigh contradictory evidence, seems relatively arbitrary. James goes to rhetorical lengths to support his central theme, which is that popular crime is deserving of serious attention. He’s right, but the point is hardly as controversial as he seems to think. He ridicules “intellectuals” who criticize crime stories as “petty and irrelevant.” Since he doesn’t name these intellectuals, I can’t address their arguments,
but as James himself points out, popular crime has been the subject of serious public discourse since ancient Rome. Yet while “Popular Crime” includes dozens of reviews of true-crime paperbacks and TV miniseries, it ignores the works of Damon Runyon, James Thurber, Gay Talese, Elizabeth Hardwick, Joan Didion, Jimmy Breslin or James Ellroy, to name a handful — all of whom have written extensively about crimes discussed in this book. Lost in all of this, at times, is the profound human suffering that underpins these crimes. “Popular Crime” contains countless tales of serial killers and policy suggestions, but all I could think about when I put it down was the story of Christian Ross. In 1874 his 4-year-old son, Charlie, was kidnapped in his front yard. The abduction became a press sensation, and hundreds of waifs were shown to Christian with the hope that in one he might recognize his son. “I suppose I shall continue going to see boys till I die,” he said in an interview years later, “but I don’t expect to find Charlie in any of them.”
Scientists Continued from F1 China stands out. But there are plenty of others. India, Brazil and Singapore built world-class research institutes. Saudi Arabia aggressively recruits researchers for its King Abdullah University of Science and Technology. With a staggering $10 billion endowment there — larger than MIT’s — American scientists no longer need to suffer through Boston’s endless winters. Not to be outdone, Abu Dhabi opened the Masdar Institute of Science and Technology in 2009. These emerging powers have a voracious appetite for good scientists. So they’re trying to poach ours. I spent nearly two years doing molecular biology research in China. I have worked at the National Laboratory for Agrobiotechnology and at Peking University in Beijing. The Chinese are serious about science. Government spending on research and development has increased 20 percent each year over the past decade. Even in the midst of the financial crisis of 2008-09, China continued to bet big on science and technology. China now spends $100 billion annually on research and development. The Royal Society, Britain’s national science academy, estimates that by 2013, Chinese scientists will author more articles in international science journals than American scientists do.
Better benefits Chinese labs are cuttingedge intellectual melting pots of Chinese scientists trained in the East and in the West. This environment of creativity and hard work will produce big breakthroughs. Chinese universities aggressively recruit foreign scientists. The startup packages
can be generous and in some cases comparable to what a young faculty member receives in this country. In the future, China might be a better option for U.S. scientists desperate to fund their research.
Impact on U.S. What does it mean for the U.S. if we lose some of our scientific talent? The infusion of American ingenuity could be the missing catalyst for a country such as China to leapfrog America in space technology or the development of new weapons. Our own economic success and security depended on foreign talent such as Albert Einstein, Edward Teller (who developed the hydrogen bomb), and Werner von Braun (who led the development of the Saturn V booster rocket that helped the United States win the race to the moon). Would we have been as competitive if they had decided instead to work in Russia or China? Talented scientists in this country often fall through the cracks because they can’t get funding. Agencies are deluged with applications and often have to reject as many as 90 percent of the proposals they receive. Unfortunately, the situation is likely to deteriorate further as budget cuts limit the resources available for research. So I’ve started encouraging my friends to think more creatively about their careers. Go to China, I tell them. Or Singapore or Brazil or the Middle East. If the United States can’t fund its scientific talent, find a country that will. Matthew Stremlau, a graduate of Haverford College and Harvard University, is a postdoctoral fellow at the Broad Institute, which is affiliated with Harvard and MIT.
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