One-stop shopping for mystery fans!
2-4 PM Saturday, December 10
Sisters in Crime of Northern California and Mystery Writers of America
ANNUAL HOLIDAY PARTY
Borderlands Books, 866 Valencia St. (betw 19th & 20th), San Francisco
Join the fun for food, drink, & thousands of great books!
Get ZAPPED: an Edgar Rowdey Cape Cod Mystery — new from Boom-Books author CJ Verburg
Meet all your favorite Bay Area mystery writers!
For a quick preview:
Sisters in Crime of Northern California
As we move away from the Autumn Equinox toward the Winter Solstice, what better time to discover some new books?
First, if you’re a romance fan, don’t forget that you can listen to Charisse Howard’s spicy Regency Rakes & Rebels novellas, narrated by the wonderfully British actress Stevie Zimmerman. From an English manor house (Lady Annabelle’s Abduction) to a new-world pirates’ Mardi Gras (Lady Barbara & the Buccaneer) to the Barbary Coast (Lady Caroline, the Corsair’s Captive), these Regency adventures will make your pulse race and your heart throb!
Among the highlights of the recent Boston Book Festival was a fascinating nonfiction panel called Start Making Sense: Solutions to Intractable Problems:
Why can’t we just cut through the partisan bull***t and apply a little common sense to our country’s problems?
James M. Stone, in Five Easy Theses: Commonsense Solutions to America’s Greatest Economic Challenges, proposes solutions to issues like the affordability of healthcare and widening income inequality.
Philip K. Howard, in The Rule of Nobody: Saving America from Dead Laws and Broken Government, faults a governing system that has replaced leadership with overly specific rules and regulations that are followed mindlessly by bureaucrats.
MIT’s Zeynep Ton takes on the practice of companies investing too little in their employees in pursuit of profits in The Good Jobs Strategy: How the Smartest Companies Invest in Employees to Lower Costs and Boost Profits.
If you’re in the mood for a mystery, be sure to stop by Books Inc. at 2251 Chestnut Street from noon to 2 PM on Saturday, Nov. 5. Here in San Francisco’s Marina District, eleven authors from Sisters In Crime will read from and sign their new books. From Mary Feliz’s Address to Die For to our own C J Verburg’s Zapped, 
you’ll find thrills, suspense, and adventure guaranteed to fill more hours with more fun for less cost than anything you can buy at the neighboring bistros or Apple Store. Meet and mingle with Northern California authors, enjoy refreshments, and you might even wrap up your holiday shopping in one afternoon.
Happy reading!
JUST IN TIME FOR HALLOWEEN!
ZAPPED: an Edgar Rowdey Cape Cod Mystery
by C J Verburg
A posh seaside lawn party. To Cape Cod inventor Pam Nash, it’s the ideal launch for Zappa, her new “Taser for pacifists.” To her daughter Ashley, in Las Vegas getting divorced, it’s the ideal way to shake off a stalker and celebrate turning 21. For Lydia Vivaldi and Mudge Miles, sous-chefs at Leo’s Back End, it’s a catering opportunity they can’t refuse. But when a reveler is found dead in the water off the Nashes’ dock, it’s time for local artist, author, and eccentric genius Edgar Rowdey to turn sleuth before the killer destroys Pam, her family, and Zappa.
Publication date: Halloween (October 31, 2016)
Available NOW (wholesale or retail) from Ingram, Baker & Taylor, or Amazon – ask your local bookstore
Read a sample below
If you’re on Cape Cod:
Meet the author and the book in person
at the Edward Gorey House, 8 Strawberry Lane, Yarmouth Port
5 PM Thursday, October 13
Wine, snacks, good company, fabulous art, and prizes!
If you’re in San Francisco:
Join us at Canessa Gallery, 708 Montgomery St., across from the Transamerica Pyramid
5 PM Sunday, October 30
Hosted by the Telegraph Hill Dwellers
Wine, snacks, good company, prizes, costumes (optional), & video!
Check back for further details as they become available.
Chapter 1: What Happens in Vegas
Thirteen startled Las Vegas shoppers halted when Ashley and Danny Dillon came waltzing across the marble floor of Soignee: a Boutique.
Danny, muscular and golden-haired at 46, still moved with the agility of a tennis coach. Ashley, tanned and blonded by a month in a thong bikini, mirrored her father’s steps as if they’d rehearsed.
The Dress—a Justina Malo confection in blue-green silk—clung when they clung, and billowed when they twirled.
Gamblers paused on their way to the casino. Tourists clapped and held up cell phones. They Tweeted, e-mailed, posted on Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram.
Of the 3,437 people who would eventually watch this ad hoc floor show, not one linked it to the near-disaster two nights ago at the Bellagio pool.
Who’d recognize the dazzling girl in swirling chiffon as the limp body that had been dragged out of the water, strapped to a stretcher, and rushed away in an ambulance?
Who’d recognize her partner as the frantic father who’d sneaked her back into the hotel yesterday in scarves and sunglasses?
She’s alive. That was the spar Danny clung to. We made it. What if that waiter hadn’t spotted her? What if the ER doctor simply turned it over to the cops instead of phoning her dad in Florida?
What if her bottle of Elevane had been full instead of half empty?
Danny had broken the news to his ex-wife from Palm Beach Airport. Easier on everybody: he could deflect Pam’s panicky questions, and she could insist on paying his expenses instead of drop-ping everything to fly out from Cape Cod. Neither Ashley nor her mom wanted that.
Back at the Bellagio, they called Pam together. No worries.
Just a scare. You stay focused on your Zappa launch. We’ll talk more soon.
Blame could wait. What the hell kind of mother (OK, parents) would leave a fragile kid like Ashley alone, unprotected, twenty-eight hundred miles from home? Later. Top priority now was to be here for her. Get her back on her feet, out of that damn room. Squire her around the Strip, the casinos, the buffets, the shops, the Dancing Fountains. Buy her the dress of her dreams. And, having maxed out his MasterCard, pray that Pam would cover the whole trip.
But screw the cost! Danny Dillon’s number-one priority was his daughter’s happiness.
Number two was to nail the evil twisted sick-minded fuck who’d tried to kill her.
* * * * *
In Ashley Dillon’s mind, that ring of smiling faces and clapping hands was a 20th Century Fox production team begging her to star in their upcoming remake of The King and I.
How could she help but be a winner in this dress?
She’d recognized it instantly. The exact same Justina Malo that Angelina Jolie wore on her goodwill tour of those dusty countries full of tents and starving children. Looking like an angel, with the floating shoulder panel draped respectfully over her head. What did that TV newsman call her? “Madonna of the Maghreb.”
Ashley rarely watched the news. But when you were stuck in a hotel all by yourself, after your unfuckingbelievably selfish roommate ran off with some cowboy she met at New York New York, what choice did you have?
It made her cry, comparing Angelina and Brad’s beautiful marriage to hers, which she was in Las Vegas to terminate. Still, Danny had a point: Didn’t Angelina burn through two other husbands before she found Brad Pitt?
Ashley Dillon was way younger than Angelina Jolie, and shorter, with shoulder-length corn-silk hair and eyes that shifted between green and blue. That dress matches my new contact lenses, she’d thought. OMG, if I could turn 21 in that dress, I’d never be
scared of anything ever again!
And an hour ago, there it was! Glowing in Soignee’s window like a consolation prize from Fate.
Now was when Ashley’s life passed before her eyes: dancing from pillar to pillar, aswirl in aquamarine chiffon, lit by popping camera-flashes. Not two days ago, so hysterical that a fistful of Elevane couldn’t stop her shaking. Not yesterday, puking her guts out in the hospital, harassed by people pecking and pecking at her with stupid questions. Now, with her dad’s strong safe arms around her.
He spun her with one hand and caught her with the other. The 20th Century Fox reps applauded and aimed their cell phones. Sun filtering through the arched skylight and wrought-iron fretwork cast lacy shadows across her wafting skirts.
“Ta da!” Danny bowed.
“Thank you!” Ashley made a grand curtsey.
“So let’s go have a drink by the pool, babe, and take a look at those death threats.”
* * * * *
Twenty-eight hundred miles away, Phyllis Nash held the cleated main sheet with her right hand, her luffing head-scarf with her left, and raised her voice over the wind.
“Trust your stepdaughter to stage a crisis on Desolation Day!”
Harry Nash answered with what might have been a grimace or a grin. “I doubt she timed it for us.”
Mother and son sat knee to knee in the cockpit of their Herreshoff daysailer, squinting out at the rising and falling surface of Nantucket Sound.
Thin leather driving gloves covered Harry’s burn-scarred hands. Aviator glasses and a broad-brimmed canvas hat protected his shiny seamed head and dented face from the sun. The hat fastened under his chin with a bead, like his favorite boyhood Stetson. Four years of plastic surgery had left him looking remarkably like the Harry Nash in Phyllis’s family albums, including his permanent half-smile.
“She’s all right now, isn’t she? Out of danger?”
“Hard to say.” Harry shrugged. “Danny’s bound to downplay it till he finds out what the hell’s going on.”
“I do feel for the poor girl.” Phyllis, being a diplomat’s widow, conceded that at her age she was fortunate to have not only regained a lost son but added a daughter-in-law and a granddaughter. “The one time she acts sensibly. Dumping that horrid husband. You know, it won’t surprise me if he’s behind this.”
“We’ll see what Danny finds out.” Harry, being a war veteran, conceded that Ashley Dillon was a loose cannon. “Hell of a thing for Pam, anyhow. Like she hasn’t got enough cops, colonels, and whatnot breathing down her neck.”
“How such a gifted woman could produce such a feckless child!”
“I told her, Take some time off. Go talk to Edgar Rowdey. He’s an expert on mystery stalkers.”
Phyllis nodded approval. “Sufficient unto the day are the evils thereof.”
On the first Sunday in August eight years ago, the convoy carrying Harry and Scott Nash into an Afghan village had hit a booby trap. The remains the Army later extracted from the rubble were so fragmented that the brothers’ whole unit was presumed dead.
Phyllis claimed that losing both his sons literally broke her husband’s heart. Exactly one year later, Vernon Nash took a nap after lunch and never woke up again.
In Harry’s opinion, it would make more sense to celebrate his own resurrection than the deaths of Vern and Scotty. Harder to pin down, admittedly. His recollections of the ambush were patchy. Smoke and dust too thick to breathe. Scorching heat. And noise! A roar like the end of the world. Gunfire, men screaming, a dog howling, flames crackling . . . and blackout.
He’d awakened in agony, jolting down a rutted dirt road on an oxcart.
As for the milestones in his struggle toward recovery, those he was glad to forget.
That was Harry Nash’s Afghanistan: a bottomless pool from which his nightmares rose and circled like sharks.
Phyllis knew this. She’d nodded her head when he explained it—sculpted platinum-and-pewter hair, sable lashes, penciled brows—but he could see it didn’t sink in.
Her Afghanistan was a monster that had devoured her family.
She shouted again over the wind. “Will Ashley stay in Las Vegas till the divorce is done?”
“That’s the plan. You know, it’s not just Pam’s Zappa bash she’ll miss. Her twenty-first birthday is next week.”
“You know what I say to that,” Phyllis adjusted her Audrey Hepburn sunglasses. “Let her eat cake.”
Two summers ago, Ashley had (in Phyllis’s view) tried to ruin Pam and Harry’s Cape Cod wedding by turning a toast to the bride and groom into an announcement of her own engagement. This after her fiancé showed up at the ceremony in ragged denim shorts and an ill-cut plaid jacket.
“But enough of Ashley,” said Phyllis. “This is our day! Let’s observe it in peace.”
Every Desolation Day they sailed into the past. With Vern’s diplomatic duties shuttling him around the globe, the Nashes had rarely taken traditional vacations. Several times an uprising sent the boys off to boarding school, or home to Bethesda. Wherever they were, at least once a year the four of them gathered at the Nash Cottage on Compass Point for a voyage aboard the family sloop.
“Ready about!” barked Harry.
The farthest they’d go in this little daysailer was the crocodile crags and flashlight-battery lighthouse of Bishop and Clark’s. But in their memories they cruised around Monomoy Island, up the Cape’s long sandy arm past Provincetown, past Scituate and Nantasket . . .
“Hard alee!”
Over went the tiller. Down went their heads, to avoid the swinging boom. Out flew the mainsail. The ropes, damp with sea-spray and hot from the sun, rasped through Phyllis’s hands.
She nudged her son’s twisted shoulder. “Living well is the best revenge!”
“And who could live better than this?”
That was the real point of Desolation Day. The two surviving Nashes couldn’t get back what they’d lost: loved ones, physical agility, years of grief. But they had this consolation prize: a sunny August afternoon gliding across the water, a salty breeze riffling their jackets, filling their sails, and stirring their memories.
Phyllis never talked about Vern’s death. Nor did she ever ask Harry about the ambush that killed Scott. He’d told her the whole grim story when he first came home. Ever since, if anyone raised the subject, she changed it.
The Harry Nash who’d enlisted to serve his country in Afghanistan would have been touched. Such a delicate soul, his mother, that even the passing of an old man in his sleep was too painful to recall. The Harry Nash who’d come back, who’d seen dozens of young men blown to shreds, stifled an urge to ask her: Why so squeamish? What are you hiding?
Squeamish? Phyllis wouldn’t leave the house unless her clothes, hair, and makeup were perfect; yet here she sat without a qualm, her thigh against his, looking into his distorted face with open affection.
For his survival Harry credited genes, training, the villagers who’d dug him out, and the doctors who’d pieced him back together. For his marriage to Pam, he congratulated himself on his superhuman charm. For Phyllis’s devotion, he could only thank God.
She smiled as if she’d overheard his thoughts. “We’ve been lucky.”
“Yes.”
“I do hope Danny and the police can put an end to this thing without Ashley sucking Pam into it.”
“If she does,” Harry wiped sea-spray off his sunglasses, “I’ll kill her myself.”
What are our authors up to this summer?
Charisse Howard, who gave us the gripping American Regency novel Dark Horseman and the Britain-and beyond Regency Rakes & Rebels novella series, takes us on a musical tour of a botanical garden in “Flower Piano: a Regency Afternoon in San Francisco”:
“You don’t have to be a Regency fan to love Strybing Arboretum. But if you’ve ever dreamed of strolling under a parasol across a sunny greensward, over a rustic bridge, under a century-old magnolia tree, this place will light up your inner Jane Austen.”
Carol Verburg is getting ready for the Killer Nashville mystery writers’ conference in August, where she’ll present two new works-in-progress. Zapped is Book 2 in her Edgar Rowdey Cape Cod Mystery series, following Croaked. Another Number for the Road is Book 2 in her Cory Goodwin Mystery series, the sequel to Silent Night Violent Night.
By day, Carol’s madly typing. By night, she’s reading (or watching) mysteries. Her latest blog post reviews two unusual additions to the genre.
Pamela Beason’s The Only Witness is “an ingenious & charming mystery, starring improbably sympathetic characters”: an abducted baby, its distraught teenage mother, an out-of-sorts detective, and a professional “family” that’s half human and half gorilla.
In The House of Silk, Anthony Horowitz (creator of Foyle’s War and many books for children and adults) steps into the role of Watson to add his own story to the Sherlock Holmes canon. It “starts out familiar & promising—Baker Street ambience, unnerved client, deductive legerdemain, bristly camaraderie (Holmes-Watson) & sibling rivalry (Sherlock-Mycroft)—& expands fluidly into a web of business, art, society, & politics.”
Want to know more? See 2 Mystery Reviews: Beason’s The Only Witness & Horowitz’s The House of Silk.
The Second Coming
by William Butler Yeats
Surely some revelation is at hand;
by C J Verburg
Not very sexy, i
s it? “The US National Toxicology Program Carcinogenesis Studies of Cell Phone Radiofrequency Radiation” — the name alone could put you to sleep. But the reality behind it is an urgent wake-up call. It’s already woken AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, & the other communications corporations that have staked billions of dollars on our addiction to staying connected.
What the preliminary results that were released a month ago tell us is (surprise!) there’s truth in the rumor that heavy exposure to cellphone radiation can cause cancer.
Skipping over what this says about the need to change our habits, what does it mean to the companies who provide our service? Well, for one thing: ACT FAST! Put up as many cellular/wireless antennas and panels as possible before the regulations tighten.
Here in California, an ambitious assembly member by the name of Mike Gatto is rushing through legislation to free cellular/wireless facilities from even the few regulations that already exist. We’ve received urgent warnings about this from both sides of San Francisco’s political spectrum.
PLEASE DO EVERYTHING YOU CAN TO STOP AB 2788 from passing!
That means: Call, email, and/or write to your representatives in Sacramento by June 20 opposing AB 2788. If this bill passes, your neighborhood could soon look like this, because neither you as a citizen nor your local government would have any say about it.
Who are your state reps?
What’s their contact info?
Find out on this handy website: http://findyourrep.legislature.ca.gov/
Here are details about AB 2788, reprinted from an e-mail just received:
AB 2788 hearing
June 21, 9 am
California Senate Energy, Utilities and Communication Committee, Sacramento.
[Assemblyman Mike] Gatto gutted a natural gas storage bill on June 13 and replaced with this cell antenna bill. In it he says small cell are “not a municipal affair” just as the previous bill passed recently [AB 57] ruled that collocation facilities are “not a municipal affair.” Next stop is cell towers as a whole.
I think the NTP [National Toxicology Program; see above] research is driving this legislative rush before CalEPA lists RF as a carcinogen, as Ken Foster of IEEE expects to happen. One important action everyone should take is to write CalEPA and Calif. Dept. of Public Health to request this now; cc to Gatto’s office when you do that.
Gatto is also the author of the Abolish CPUC constitutional amendment which will also be heard at the hearing. As bad and corrupt as the CPUC, this constitutional amendment by this bought and paid for legislator, despite his high-sounding rhetoric in the text, is simply staging a give-away for utilities. Instead of one-place regulation for all utilities, his amendment squirrels the oversight away into different rabbit holes of captured agencies in the state, with far less visibility. This is bad, bad, bad.
by CJ Verburg
From the Daily Alta California of May 23, 1856:
Our streets have assumed a more quiet aspect this morning than we have witnessed for several days past. The proceedings of yesterday have very naturally produced such a result.
Execution of James P. Casey and Charles Cora, By The Vigilance Committee, of San Francisco, on Thursday, May 22d, 1856, from the Windows of their Rooms, in Sacramento Street, between Front and Davis Streets. Made by Huestis; sold by M. Ullman, New York. From the Bancroft Library: BANC PIC 1963.002:02–B
The Alta didn’t need to spell out the details. Everyone in the little city of San Francisco (which filled an area roughly from today’s South Beach to Mission to North Beach) knew what “proceedings” had occurred on Thursday, May 22.
While 3000+ armed San Franciscans hanged two human symbols of violence, corruption, and vice, the rest of the city marched toward Lone Mountain Cemetery to bury James King of William, crusading editor of the Evening Bulletin.
Supervisor Casey’s crime was shooting King in the street on May 14 for refusing to retract an insult he printed in the Bulletin. Although King did not appear to be mortally wounded, a surfeit of medical attention soon finished him off. When the Vigilantes took over the County Jail on Broadway and removed Casey to their own “Fort Vigilance” for a kangaroo trial, they also removed gambler Charles Cora, who was awaiting retrial for fatally shooting a U.S. Marshal, arguably in self-defense.
Here is the Bulletin’s account of San Francisco’s transformation in May 1856:
There never was a more perfect or complete revolution in the government, or the affairs of a community, than in this city the past week.Among our citizens confidence is restored, and the virtue, intelligence, and ability of our people to govern themselves. Those who lived in fear of some outrage upon their lives or property feel a security greater than they have experienced in a long time.
We had witnessed the bold attempt at assassination in our streets; we had seen the infuriated mass rush wildly after the prisoner, with exclamations of “Hang him!” filling the air.
We had witnessed the organization of the Vigilance Committee in our very midst, with a list of 3,000 names; we had witnessed their formidable array in the streets of our city; and we had witnessed their successful campaign of rescuing the prisoners, Casey and Cora, from the jail on Sunday; all attended with the most intense and enthusiastic excitement.
But never until the death of Mr. King was announced yesterday [May 20], at half past one o’clock, have we seen such a powerful and universal demonstration of real, true, heartfelt sorrow and mourning as was exhibited by our people.
On Thursday morning, many of our business and private dwelling houses, that had not previously robed in black, put on the garb of mourning, and the flags of the city, with but one exception—Engine Company Number Ten—hung at half mast. At an early hour, the meetings and organizations of our different societies took place; and by twelve o’clock, all were ready to join in the procession.
The body of the deceased had been conveyed to his late residence at the corner of Pacific and Mason Streets. A few minutes before noon, the hearse was borne to the Unitarian Church on Stockton Street. The church was well filled long before the hour appointed. Mrs. King and children and Mr. Thomas S. King [the deceased’s younger brother] were seated in front of the pulpit, and the immediate friends of the deceased in the adjoining pews.
The cortege moved in the following order:
The Masonic Order in full regalia with the Royal Arch Chapter. A carriage containing the Reverend Misters Cutler, Lacy, and Taylor. A carriage containing the physicians to the late deceased. The hearse, drawn by four gray horses richly caparisoned, attended on each side by the pallbearers. Carriage containing Mrs. King and children and Mr Thomas S. King. Carriages containing mourning friends of the deceased.
Attaches of the Evening Bulletin on foot. California Pioneers with badges and mourning emblems. Members of the press in the city and towns in the interior. Sacramento Guard in full uniform. The San Francisco Fire Department in citizens’ dress, headed by the chief engineer. Every company was largely represented except Number Ten.
The San Francisco Minstrels, members of the theatrical profession, and the musical bands of the city with muffled instruments. The boys from St. Mary’s Library Association. The draymen of the city on horseback, to the number of 350 men. The steveodores, with banners, numbering 142 men. The Turnverein Society in full costume. A deputation of 10 colored persons with badges representing the San Francisco Athenaeum, a library association composed of colored persons. These were followed by a large number of carriages and private vehicles. It is estimated that the procession extended a mile and a half in length.
The tragic martyrdom of a hero was just the story San Franciscans needed to excuse themselves for taking the law into their own hands and lynching two scapegoats. It also got them off the hook for not utilizing the legal system already in place. If any Vigilantes felt guilty for leaving the job of cleaning up their city to James King of William while he lived, they could pat themselves on the back for doing a zealous job of avenging his death.
But in reality there was more to the story than that. When we come back, a 160th-anniversary look at some startling twists behind the purification of San Francisco.
Reprinted from “Vigilante Justice in San Francisco” https://boom-books.com
by C J Verburg
I picked my late cat Grusha because she was born on Cape Cod right around the time my friend and neighbor Edward Gorey died. If souls do by any chance migrate, I figured he’d come back as a cat — most likely a delicately etched black-and-white one.
Edward embraced all cats. I wish he could share the pleasure of getting to know my new one, Roo. Her harlequin coloring and sweet disposition are happy reminders of every cat who’s shared my home over the years . . . and Edward’s home, too: her nose is George, her bib is Weedon, her face is half Alice and half Thomas, and her back is a pastel Jane. Those are the five cats Edward was down to by the end of his life, each with a plain English name for daily use, and a secret Japanese name from his favorite book, The Tale of Genji.
(George and Weedon Grossmith, among their many talents and enterprises, wrote the comic English novel The Diary of a Nobody. Hugh Bonneville, lately famous as Lord Grantham of Downton Abbey, proved his thespian chops years earlier by starring in a mesmerizing film of that unfilmable book. George Grossmith also pops up in the Gilbert & Sullivan biopic Topsy-Turvy.)
Now an innovative thespian troupe in New York has staged a play written and directed by Travis Russ, in which three actors play Edward Gorey in a life imagined by Russ from his own life plus a lot of reading and mulling. It’s called Gorey: The Secret Lives of Edward Gorey, and it’s playing at HERE, 145 Avenue of the Americas, through May 22. Reviews are strong enough that those of us who can’t make it to Manhattan this month may get another shot.
Meanwhile, anyone curious about Edward’s real life in the theater can still read/see/hear the whole story in my print and e-book Edward Gorey On Stage. One of my enterprises for this summer is creating an updated edition and adapting the book specifically for iPad.
The Agatha Christie mystery Edward and I once talked about setting at our friend Jack’s breakfast-and-lunch cafe, Jack’s Out Back, became Croaked: an Edgar Rowdey Cape Cod Mystery (also available in print and e- form). Its sequel, Zapped, is in the labyrinthine publishing pipeline. While I’m waiting, I’ve started a novella . . . peering (as I type) over the furry helper who’s exploring my keyboard to assert her proper place as center of human attention.
Books. Cats. Life is good.
by CJ Verburg
The land of precision watches and fine chocolate has grander ambitions for the 21st-century than a better cuckoo clock. Just up Montgomery Street from the Transamerica Pyramid is Swissnex, HQ for Switzerland’s high-tech liaisons with the Bay Area and Silicon Valley. On
Friday night, April 8, we’re here to learn about investigative projects in which scientists based at ETH Zurich (“Where Einstein launched his career”) are directing research teams of hundreds, thousands, or millions of ordinary citizens around the world.
That unassuming man in geeky glasses and rolled-up shirtsleeves is Kevin Schawinski, Professor of Galaxy & Black Hole Astrophysics at ETH Zurich. A winner of the Royal Astronomical Society’s thesis prize at Oxford and a NASA Einstein Fellowship at Yale, he also cofounded the Galaxy Zoo. As his colleague Lucy Fortson will explain shortly, galaxies fall into two basic groups: blue spiral, which are relatively young and still forming stars, and red elliptical, AKA “red and dead.”
In this age of Big Data, projects such as the Sloan Digital Sky Survey can provide scientists with more information than any one person, university, or even nation can process. After classifying 50,000 galaxies himself, Schawinski turned over the other 950,000 in the pipeline to sharp-eyed online observers. “Within 24 hours of launch we were stunned to be receiving almost 70,000 classifications an hour.” That’s the Galaxy Zoo. If it sounds like fun, you can click here and start classifying galaxies yourself right now.
First speaker on the panel is Professor of Computational Social Sciences Dirk Helbing, whose specialties include crowds and traffic. He gives us a whirlwind tour of Big Data issues and responses, starting with the paradox that as information proliferates, the percentage we can process drops: What we CAN know may actually decrease what we DO know. We do know that governments and corporations are voraciously collecting data on individuals. In China, “citizen scores” on a multitude of measures are already becoming the basis for what each citizen is allowed to do. Helbing coordinates the FuturICT Initiative, which uses smart data to understand techno-socio-economic systems. His project Nervousnet is “a decentralized Internet of Things platform for privacy-preserving social sensing services.” Provided as a public good, it’s a two-way open-source mobile app. Nervousnet is holding its first Hackathon April 22-23 — check it out.
Dr. Ulrich Genick moved from biochemistry in Berlin to structural biology and biophysics at Scripps, the Salk Institute, and Brandeis, to leading a large-scale study on the interplay of human genetics, metabolism, and taste perception at the NRC in Lausanne. Now he’s at ETH Zurich’s Institute of Molecular Systems Biology, where last year he cofounded the MIDATA health data cooperative. Its intent is to restore control of personal data (health data in particular) to the sources of that data. Instead of signing over your privacy rights to any service that demands them as a condition of access, you’d be able to retain secure ownership of your own data and license its use.
Genick explains why his current research focuses on taste and smell: the genetic specificity and wide individual variation of those senses (single nucleotide polymorphism) makes them ideal for investigating the relationship between genotype (your specific genetic sequence) and phenotype (how you experience, say, a cup of coffee). The more participants who supply their DNA analysis and their sensory perceptions, the more accurate a portrait can be created of which nucleotides play what role in the genetics of taste and smell.
Widening our view from nucleotides to galaxies is Professor Lucy Fortson, a founding member of the Zooniverse project and current board chair for the Citizen Science Alliance. In her vision of the emerging future of scientific research, human beings operate as a single multicellular investigator, eerily parallel to the multistellar galaxies they’re classifying. 
Fortson’s own sleuthing took her from high-energy physics at the CERN particle accelerator in Geneva to cosmic ray and gamma ray astrophysics with the Chicago Air Shower Array at the University of Chicago; currently she’s at the University of Minnesota. She recalls her and Kevin Schawinski’s happy surprise at the Galaxy Zoo’s success, which encouraged its proponents to add a few more projects, then many more. Now it’s morphed into the Zooniverse, a worldwide online platform which invites volunteers everywhere to collaborate on research projects from astronomy to zoology.
Dr. Adrien Treuille, V.P. of Simulation at Zoox, came to this driverless-car startup from Google X; before that, he taught computer science and robotics at Carnegie Mellon. He zooms us back down to micro level as the creator of the online games Foldit and Eterna. 
In challenging players to compete at folding proteins and designing RNA, these games (like the Zooniverse and other projects discussed here tonight) also establish a collaboration among far-flung strangers. On a personal level, they awaken creativity and skills that participants never knew they had. On a scientific level, they focus a myriad of sharp eyes and minds on problems that are too vast and/or complicated for any ordinary pod of humans (or computers) to solve.
Along with the parallels among citizen-science projects, Lucy Fortson notes a contrast. For her research, she seeks as many participants as possible — the more people, the better the data. For his, Adrien Treuille seeks the most skillful participants. His games encourage self-selection: if you don’t win more points than the other players figuring out how to fold a protein from its amino-acid sequence, you’ll soon quit. Ulrich Genick takes a more traditional approach in his sensory research by recruiting a specific number of volunteers to study in a specific place. Similarly, for Dirk Helbing, a crowd of participants are his subject as well as his collaborators.
Emerging from this heady gathering, I find myself mulling over two common themes. One is the shift in scientific research from direct observation of physical subjects to designing experiments with and for computers. Do astronomy or botany students still choose the field from an attraction to planets or plants, or is the aptest motivation nowadays a desire to count and track? The other thread is the remarkable way the Internet age is bringing out the collective tendencies of human beings. We’re gravitating toward our ant-colony or school-of-fish side: diverse minds finding not just a common purpose but a common direction and rhythm. This is not new, but it’s a 180-degree-turn from my generation’s passionate commitment to individual self-discovery and self-expression.
I’ve been wondering for decades how the Net — freeing human connections from geography and even time — would change the concept of community. Maybe one answer is Citizen Science.
by CJ Verburg
“Plenty of people got Iraq wrong, but plenty of people – experts and ordinary citizens – got it right. The problem was that it made no difference.”
So states St. Louis-based writer Sarah Kendzior in “Iraq and the Reinvention of Reality” in the March 28 Al Jazeera.
I’ve been teaching a course on non-Western literature this winter at San Francisco’s Mechanics’ Institute Library, and our April class focuses on Iraq. So lately I’ve been reading a lot of fiction and nonfiction by Iraqis. It’s not an exploration to undertake lightly. Writers in all war-torn countries radiate a deadly consciousness that what they say matters. Some stake their lives on speaking out; some resort to allegory or magical realism or another veiled approach to spread their message before the censors or military police can snuff it. Whatever the tactics, one discerns an unquenchable flicker of hope.
Yet in contemporary Iraqi literature the dominant tone is bleakness. These are writers – human beings – to whom normal life, as we in the West define it (a morning chat over coffee, checking e-mail, grocery shopping, a sunset stroll) is foreign. If they’ve ever encountered normality, it was long ago or far away.
Rory McCarthy’s disturbing book Nobody Told Us We Are Defeated: Stories from the New Iraq depicts a normality in which shopping or a stroll could very well end in random arrest, imprisonment, torture, even death, for no other reason than that the government’s most powerful and popular tool is intimidation.
Sarah Kendzior pushes that bleakness a quantum leap further.
“The Iraq war is notable not only for journalistic weakness, but for journalistic futility: the futility of fact itself. Fact could not match the fabrications of power. Eventually, our reality shifted to become what they conceived. ‘I could have set myself on fire in protest on the White House lawn and the war would have proceeded without me,’ wrote Bush speechwriter David Frum.
“That was the message of the Iraq war: There is no point in speaking truth to power when power is the only truth.”I heard years ago that an aide to President George W. Bush had scoffed at a journalist during the Iraq war for being part of the “reality-based community.” Kendzior sets that remark in context. Here’s an extract from her article, e-mailed by a friend (thank you, Tom Englezos). I strongly urge you to read the whole piece.
“In 2002, Ron Suskind, a reporter for the New York Times, met with an unnamed aide to George W Bush who accused Suskind of being part of the ‘reality-based community’. The aide meant it as an insult: this was not the way the world worked anymore.“‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality,’ said the aide, later alleged to be Bush adviser Karl Rove. ‘And while you’re studying that reality – judiciously, as you will – we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.’
“In one sense, this quote seems of a piece with its era – with the entry of truthiness into the dictionary, with the rise of whole industries, like reality TV, built on choreographed sincerity. But while we may associate the ‘creation of reality’ with a wildly hubristic administration, it remains the flavour of our time, a manipulation that moves from crisis to crisis. . . .
“We see remnants of this created reality in the financial crisis – the ongoing ‘great recession’ that, like preemptive war, has transformed what Americans will accept. It is normal for criminal financiers to receive record bonuses in an age marked by austerity, it is normal for professionals to work years unpaid in the hope of someday landing a job, it is normal for one year of college to cost more than the average median income. This is normal, they say – but if Iraq should have taught us anything, it is how easily and brazenly ‘normal’ can be redefined.”
What Iraqi literature teaches us is that literary technique is no mere artistic device. The late Colombian writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez, asked about his use of magical realism, answered that he simply described life as he observed it. Any writer living the nightmare described by one of Rory McCarthy’s sources – “Even in my dreams I saw them . . . Every single minute I felt they would take me away for execution” – has crossed the border that for most Westerners protects the reality-based community.
When the United States invaded Iraq, we changed it forever. Iraq, in turn, forever changed reality in the United States and the world.