Instructors: Karen Weintraub & Billy Baker

The Ist List: Atheist, Feminist, Astrophysicist

-Elke Blackstone

In his spare, sunny office on the fourth floor of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA), Jonathan McDowell is explaining his relationship to the media.

“They like me because if they keep me talking long enough, I’ll make a fool of myself and they can quote me,” he jokes.

He may, in part, be referring to a quote he gave a London newspaper, The Daily Mail, in February of 2008, resulting in the front page headline, “Bush branded ‘cowboy of space’ after decision to shoot down malfunctioning satellite,” but his lack of self-censorship is not the main reason that he is a draw for journalists reporting on outer space. McDowell, a Smithsonian astrophysicist working on NASA’s Chandra x-ray telescope, has a way of drilling down through the technical minutiae of a complicated topic and illuminating the nugget of truth at the center. He explains astronomical phenomena in a way that paints a picture and tells a story that non-scientists can understand.

Take for instance, his description of Chandra – a space-based x-ray telescope sitting on a satellite 60 thousand miles above the Earth, or a quarter of the way to the moon.

“Hubble’s easy to explain because Hubble looks at the ordinary light that you and I see,” he says, referring to NASA’s more famous optical telescope, “But it turns out that if you only look at stuff in ordinary light, you miss a lot of what’s going on in the universe. When you have a star shining away, like the sun, most of what it puts out is visible light, which is one of the reasons our eyes have evolved to see that. But when things go very badly wrong, like a star explodes, or a black hole is swallowing stuff, in those sort of extreme conditions, the kind of light that tends to be made is x-rays. The way I think about it is that Hubble sees the 90% of the universe that’s just humming along normally, while Chandra sees the 10% of the universe that’s really fucked up. And since a lot of the objects in the universe go through an evolutionary phase like that, you’re seeing the 10% of the time in something’s life where something really dramatic is happening.”

McDowell knows a thing or two about evolutionary phases, dramatic moments, and things being really fucked up – not only in outer space, but in his own life. He started out as a young space buff and became a rocket scientist. Along the way, the qualities that made him a good scientist – high-level cognitive reasoning coupled with a deep curiosity and sense of wonder about the universe – led him to a second profession, of sorts; that of a social and political activist.

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Born in Georgia in 1960, while his father was on a year-long sabbatical at Georgia Tech, McDowell and his younger brother were raised in England by their parents, Brenda and M.R. Coulter McDowell. His mother was a French teacher, his father a physicist, and they both turned to atheism shortly after Jonathan’s birth (“My theory is that I was the final proof that God didn’t exist.”). Growing up in an atheist family, McDowell went his own way for a time, remaining agnostic until early adolescence, when a burgeoning obsession with the space program helped him come to some conclusions. According to him, information on the space program was hard to come by in England at that time, so McDowell would go to the local library to pore through publications like Flight International Magazine and Jane’s All The World’s Aircraft, carefully copying out lists of launched satellites and learning as much as he could about space. Then one day, what he was reading in an astronomy book pulled some important threads together.

“The description of how things in the universe had evolved in this logical way from natural processes – the life cycle of stars and the life cycle of planets and how it all came together, just clicked with me,” he says. “It was almost an audible [snaps fingers and makes a popping sound with his mouth]. Ohhhhh, this feels right. Guy with beard sitting on a cloud going ‘shazam’ feels wrong. This makes sense to me. It’s consistent with the world around me, as I understand it, it’s consistent with what I know of science. So from that point on, I never had any doubt in my mind. Clearly the universe evolves in a natural way without supernatural intervention and the rest is just fairy stories.”

**********************

When not speaking of inherently serious matters, McDowell punctuates nearly every sentence with a smiling upward inflection and an enthusiastic bob of the torso, which jostles his thick, shoulder-length, silver and auburn hair. This physical tic makes conversing with him feel something like a game in which your opponent is bent on giving you clues and letting you win. He has none of the droning intonation of the scientist talking down to the acolyte. McDowell, by his very nature, is encouraging.

In the remodeled kitchen of his 1900 square foot loft in an industrial area of Somerville, McDowell is bobbing and smiling as he makes green tea and philosophizes. It’s a warm day. The windows are open. Occasionally a Green Line train rumbles past, but he barely notices.

“My connection to astronomy is very tightly coupled to philosophy and to my view of the universe, both logical and emotional,” he says. “My sense of wonder, my core construction of what life is, seeing humans in the context of this atheistic, natural universe and us as natural beings within it. It is my responsibility to construct meaning, to decide what meaning I want to give my life because I don’t believe that there is an externally imposed meaning. To that extent, going into cosmology and working on my PhD on the early universe, came at least partly out of that desire to explore philosophically the meaning of life as well as a scientific fascination with the black holes, big bang, whizzo stuff.”

McDowell’s home library is not like yours. Roughly a third of his loft is taken up by tall bookshelves – actual stacks that you can get turned around and lost in. There is a ladder for reaching the top volumes. It turns out that the list of satellite launches that McDowell copied out of the back of Jane’s All The World’s Aircraft when he was eleven, was the seed of something much larger. Through constant, diligent effort McDowell has grown the list into what it is today: the journal of record for space launches – the most complete list in the world. But the library is not all astronomy. There is also a large section devoted to science fiction – what McDowell refers to as “Twinkie brain food.” There is a lamp in there and a reading chair.

The other dominant feature of McDowell’s home is what he refers to as his “command center.” McDowell’s home computer is not like yours. He has three computers and two laptops linked up together with four monitors stacked on top of each other. The set up looks like something you could land planes with. At work, McDowell manages a team of astrophysicists working on the Chandra project. He spends most of his time in meetings or checking in with people, directing workflow. If he wants to do science, he comes home.

Here at the Brickbottom Lofts, most of the tenants are artists. The building is reminiscent of a dormitory in that the residents decorate their front doors and adjacent hallway walls with their own original works. McDowell is not an artist. His front door is plastered with glorious, spiraling pictures of outer space.

***********************

While working on his PhD at the Institute of Astronomy at Cambridge (England), McDowell had another revelation that shifted and clarified his worldview. He noticed that the female scientists he was friends with at school seemed to be lacking the confidence of their male peers. Many of them seemed to feel like imposters – as though they could be caught at any moment impersonating people with actual science and math abilities. He theorized that this false internal image arose from growing up in a culture in which women were told from a very early age that science and math simply weren’t for girls – that those were skills and professions better left to men who were inherently good at them. At the same time he noticed that most of the women he knew had distorted body images, believing themselves to be aesthetically inferior to some perceived norm. And then one day it clicked. These two problems, he realized, were the same problem – the symptoms of a culturally systemic oppression of women.

“Suddenly the idea of the patriarchy made sense to me,” he says, “And I got pissed.”

In 1988, McDowell moved to Boston to do postdoctoral research on quasars at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory. At that time, the anti-abortion movement in the United States was swelling ranks. Operation Rescue was staging huge protests at abortion clinics all over the U.S., including Boston. They were enormous, theatrical affairs in which hundreds of anti-abortion protesters would descend on clinics, blocking the entrances with their bodies, screaming at and threatening patients trying to enter. McDowell felt compelled to throw himself into the fray.

“It was just this confluence of everything I didn’t like,” he says. “They were attacking women’s rights, which I’d been sensitized to, they were also the same people who believe the universe had only begun a few thousand years ago which sort of pushes all my astronomer buttons, right? So I just had this gut feeling of, ‘Not in my town, kid.’ And I got involved in going out in the streets to protest against that.”

That was when McDowell began his work as a volunteer escort for clinics that provide abortion services – work he continues to this day, though under less chaotic conditions. In the late ’80′s and early ’90′s, pro-choice activism was something akin to a military operation. They were trained in techniques like creating a corridor of human bodies leading to clinic entrances. The corridor consisted of an offset, double-layer of people, so that the protesters couldn’t crawl through their legs. They had reconnaissance teams waiting at area clinics to alert a phone tree if Operation Rescue protesters descended. They had a spy network watching the churches from which the protesters would pour into the streets at agreed-upon times and swarm to the chosen clinic of the day. It was a heady time. It was dangerous work.

Things began to change in 1992, when the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) act passed. The FACE act did not prohibit people from protesting peacefully outside of abortion clinics, but it did make it illegal for protesters to threaten, intimidate, or physically prevent people from getting in the front door. As more and more anti-abortion activists were sentenced to two-year prison terms for violating the new law, many  protesters seemed to decide that the potential cost of their activism was too high. Their numbers dwindled. And then the backlash came.

*****************************************

On the morning of December 30th, 1994, McDowell was doing research at the Harvard Geology Library. Unusually, there was a radio on at the circulation desk, but he was absorbed in his reading and tuned it out. He pricked up his ears, though, when he heard the students at the desk discussing abortion. Curious, he approached them, and that was when he learned that a man named John C. Salvi had, just half an hour earlier, gone on a shooting rampage at two abortion clinics in Brookline. Two people were dead, five were wounded, and there was a massive manhunt underway.

McDowell immediately headed to Preterm Health Services – one of the clinics that had come under attack and where he had been scheduled to work as an escort the following morning. There he was confronted with bullet holes, caution tape, and the news that a woman he knew, 38-year-old Leanne Nichols, was dead. Salvi had shot her ten times as she sat at her desk.

Later that afternoon, McDowell stood on the sidewalk in Coolidge Corner, openly crying as he handed out hastily-made fliers for a candlelight vigil that night. Several hundred mourners attended the vigil. They sang, cried, embraced, reassured each other that they were all in one piece, though they felt shattered into thousands.

The next morning, with Salvi still on the loose, McDowell rose early and headed out to Repro Associates in Coolidge Corner – the only area clinic open that day. As he pulled on his “Volunteer Escort” jacket, he felt like he was pulling on a giant bull’s eye. The protesters at the clinic were defiant and unapologetic. McDowell, the lone escort for part of the morning until a few others arrived, kept his eyes on the rooftops, watching for snipers. He was very afraid, but felt compelled to stand his ground.

“I couldn’t stay home because…I just couldn’t,” he says, unsmiling. “I needed to act out my grief, I guess, and go ‘fuck you’ to them. It was a very intense time. It was New Year’s Eve and a couple of days later I had to go to a conference in [Washington] D.C. in astronomy land and I was so disassociated. It was a really bad time. Leanne was the first person I’d ever known who was murdered. I’d been thinking about moving on to other issues at that point, but I felt like, I have to stay with this. I’m not going to be scared away.”

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In the warmer months, McDowell sets aside roughly half an hour each day to chat with the ten undergraduate students who are chosen every summer to intern at the CfA. They are his advisees and part of his role is to make sure they’re holding up under the academic pressure and staying on track. Because he is who he is, McDowell is concerned not only with the progress and well-being of each individual student, but with the diversity of the group as a whole. According to him, there should be a good mix of students from both larger, more competitive schools and smaller colleges with no name recognition, as well as an equal number of men and women.

“We’re very proud that we’ve been fifty-fifty male-female throughout the history of the program,” he says, with a happy torso-bob. “That required, I think, a little bit of affirmative action in the early days, but not anymore. The undergraduate women are really strong now, which is a really pleasant change to see.”

McDowell has long been preoccupied with promoting diversity wherever possible, and specifically within his own field, but he’s not the guy who sits on committees. He’s the guy who makes a point of booking female scientists to speak at the CfA’s summer colloquia series. He’s the guy who asks conference organizers, “Why, out of the twenty speakers here, is only one of them female?” He’s the guy who makes sure that his female advisees understand that he expects them to do well, that he has total confidence in them and that living up to high expectations is within their grasp. And he’s the guy who goes to parties.

Ten years ago, two of McDowell’s colleagues started hosting dance parties at the annual meetings of the American Astronomical Society. Originally, he says, they were small shindigs for which McDowell and his friends would hand out invitations to people who seemed more on the fun side, less on the awkward side.

“It was very in-crowd and elitist of us, but fuck it, it worked. It was at least semi-consciously about building a community and making sure that these conferences were places where the people with social skills would go home and think, ‘Oh that was fun, I think I’ll go again.’ Now we rent a club and there will be, like, 300 astronomers dancing and having a good time. It just shifts the atmosphere to something that people with lives want to be a part of. That’s not explicitly a feminist thing, and yet,” he laughs, “It’s not uncorrelated, in fact.”

McDowell notes, however, that less progress has been made with minorities in the sciences. According to him, until recently there has been no core population of minorities to push for change from within, as there were, in his experience, with female astronomers. The problem starts early on, he says. From young ages, disadvantaged minorities are not learning the core subjects that will enable them, later, to specialize in scientific fields.

“It goes back to junior high and high school and until we can open that pipeline up, we won’t have the seed population to get a significant number of [minority] students in. That’s the big hole in our community right now where we’re not reflecting America, and that’s never a good thing.”

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For the past several years, McDowell has been working with two groups: the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) and the Secure World Foundation (SWF). The UCS is primarily concerned with mitigating the weaponization of space, while the SWF focuses on establishing agreements about the “rules of the road,” such as what defines a hostile act in space and guidelines for retiring defunct satellites. Part of why his involvement with these groups is satisfying work, he says, is that as hard-headed as governments and politicians can be, they’re much easier to find common ground with than anti-abortion activists. The major issues involved are physics and money – nothing that comes close to a referendum on anyone’s moral construct. He describes his role on these projects simply as “the guy who knows every satellite that’s ever been launched.”

McDowell acknowledges that he is not “a part of the herd,” but he feels that astronomers tend to stray from the herd in the same general direction. People who are drawn to science, he says, are those who have a skeptical, non-mystical view of the world. But those who are drawn to astronomy, in particular, are those whose skepticism is coupled with what he calls “a romantic streak.” Asked to drill down through it all to the nugget of truth that makes him who he is, McDowell offers a typically illuminating distillation of the structure of right and wrong by which he evaluates the world.

“How do you define good?” he asks. “I post-rationalize my definition of good to be maximizing the potential of the maximum number of people – of sentient beings – in the universe. Quality of life means having choices, being able to explore what you can do, and the more people who have the more freedom to do that, that’s what a good society feels like.”

Instructors: Karen Weintraub and Billy Baker

Driving the Pack
Elke Blackstone
When Nora Meiners arrives in Cambridge on a warm Friday morning in March, she already has two dogs in the van. One is a fifteen-year-old Chow mix, indistinguishable from a puppy except for visible cataracts, and the other is a Boston Terrier with a bunched up face like a sack of plums. Meiners is the owner of Dog Day Afternoons Country Day Prep, a high-end daycare service for a sizable contingent of Boston’s most pampered canines, and this is the morning school bus.

Meiners started the business ten years ago, at twenty-five, with her partner, Jeff Walker. Back then, she says, there were no other dog care facilities that offered what Dog Day Afternoon’s website refers to as “limo service.” Meiners explains that offering door-to-door service for no extra charge was part of a calculated cultivation of a specific clientele – namely, the top tier of Boston’s wealthy dog owners.

“It turned out to be a smart choice at the time, because honestly, many of our clients have money that is not going to be affected by the economy,” she recalls. “We actively said, ‘We need to be in these neighborhoods like Beacon Hill and Back Bay. We need to establish ourselves there because those people aren’t going anywhere and most of them don’t have back yards.’ You can’t really do dog daycare five days a week and not have a decent amount of money to spend. There are certainly people who sacrifice for it, and we are cognizant of that, but ultimately it’s a luxury. It’s a lot of money. I mean, it’s a lot of money per month to spend on your dog.”

On our way to Brookline, Meiners tells me that were I not taking up the front seat, she could fit ten to twelve dogs in the van. This seems unlikely. Between one large crate containing Simon, the Chow mix, and a child’s car seat (for her two-year-old son, Wheeler, who has already been dropped off at person daycare), the van already looks full with only two dogs aboard. Unaware of my skepticism, Meiners throws back coffee and navigates traffic.

If Meiners were a dog, she’d be an Afghan. She has rangy limbs, a long, expressive face, and a tendency to under-react to stress, which, during this era of her life, is helpful. In addition to being her business partner, Walker is also Wheeler’s father. Although he and Meiners have separated, Walker still lives in the Cambridge home that Meiners owns, while she and Wheeler live in a cramped apartment three blocks away, near Central Square. The apartment feels transitional, with bad lighting and bare walls. Meiners tells me that the lease is up in September, when she hopes to be back in her own house, without Walker. Meanwhile, they work together daily and the tension is grinding away at her love for the business.

In Brookline, we pick up a drooling Collie from a home with vaulted ceilings and a shy maid, then head to Brighton where a wiggly chocolate Lab waits in a small, but comfortable basement apartment. It’s not a dump, but it doesn’t look as though the person who lives there could afford a lot of money for daily dog pampering. Asked, Meiners explains that the Lab’s owner is her Pilates instructor. After that, we hit the Back Bay to pick up a carmel-colored whirlwind named Sigmund Freud from an extravagant brownstone overlooking Boston Common. Matthew, the handsome doorman, comes up in the elevator and asks Meiners, “You know you’re picking Siggy up Saturday and Sunday, right?”

Now that the relationship is over, working with Walker has become an exercise in diplomacy. Lately, Meiners has been pondering a career change. I ask her if she’s afraid of losing her business, her income, her stability. She’s not.

“I have failed so many times in my life and lost so much money, that none of that scares me,” she says. “I’ll always find something to do to make money. I just will. I don’t have a lot of ego – I’ll do anything as long as it will cover my bills. My identity is not tied up in what I do for a living, although it is tied up in owning my own business. As a way of life, as a philosophy, my identity is pretty wrapped up in freedom and not being told what to do.”

On Commonwealth Avenue, Meiners double-parks in front of another brownstone and gets out. Sigmund Freud is in my lap, pressing a wet nose into my neck. I stay in the van. She returns with a tiny Havanese that looks like a mop without a handle and a grey-muzzled Vizsla, which immediately sits in the car seat. The van is definitely at capacity, but there’s one more brownstone to stop at. She leaves the engine running and sprints up the steps where she is handed a leash attached to an enormous Doberman. The Doberman calmly folds herself into the last available space – an impossibly small pocket directly behind the driver’s seat – and we’re off to school.

At Dog Day Afternoons a merry band of ragtag employees sport tattoos, shy smiles, and ironic t-shirts. Roughly 30 goofy, gambolling dogs chase and wrestle each other in an outdoor enclosure the size of a city block. Walker, in crumpled jeans and shades, is visibly tense. The friction between him and Meiners is palpable. When he calls her cell phone later, her voice is quiet, but determined.

“I will walk away from that business instantly, that’s fine,” she tells him. “I’m not signing over the house. I will sign over the business tomorrow. Why? Because it’s Not. Your. House.”

On our way back to Cambridge, Meiners, who minored in photography at Emerson College, says that she has always wanted to do a photographic series on feral dogs. She recalls seeing an old female Rottweiler drinking out of a puddle in Worcester four years earlier.

“I thought, I don’t want to go anywhere near that dog, she looks Dane-Ger-Ous. But she was totally on her own. There was nobody around, it wasn’t even really near a house and I was like, ‘Huh. Somebody just let her go. She’s totally surviving, she’s good.’”

Instructors: Karen Weintraub and Billy Baker

Song of Solomon

By Elke Blackstone

In his cramped office at the Harvard Chemistry Department, Lenny Solomon is wearing a turquoise and leather bolo tie, his chunky silver and turquoise rings, a button down shirt, and blue jeans. His leather cowboy hat hangs on a hook behind the door. On a side desk are stacks of Lenny Solomon Band CD’s and a collection of raggedy cacti.

A mechanical engineer by training, Solomon has worked as lab director for Professor James Anderson in the Atmospheric Sciences Division for 31 years. Now, at sixty-four, he has accepted an early retirement package that Harvard offered to long-time employees in 2009 in an attempt to mitigate layoffs after the economic downturn. Some half-hearted excavation of his office, with its three decades of accumulated history, has begun. Every day he tries to take a few things home, but he still hasn’t made much of a dent.

Smoothing a hand over his long silver hair and then over his mustache-less silver goatee, he pauses over a pastrami sandwich to ruminate.

“Why do people wear matching shoes? I’ve been thinking about this lately. What’s the reasoning behind that?”

Some theories are offered: the human attraction to symmetry, a general antipathy toward clown fashion, but Solomon is unconvinced.

“People shouldn’t limit themselves that way, you know?” he says with a smile, tearing into a mustard packet.

A few weeks later, Solomon is in T.J. Maxx with Barbara, his wife of nearly 40 years. With them are their grandchildren (Nicholas, thirteen and Victoria, eleven), and their two toy poodles. The poodles, Tatanka and Hopi Kachina, both sport giant, comical afros.

In the lingerie section, Barbara, who suffers from post-polio disorder and walks with two canes, fearlessly lectures a pack of teenage boys on what sort of pajamas to buy their girlfriends (“No frills, no lace! Women want to be comfortable!”). She is wearing an extravagant green velvet hat high on her head, a matching green coat, and a sparkly brooch. Her wide, penetrating gaze is so intense, it almost feels like a physical weight and the teenagers treat her with deference, thanking her for her advice. Elsewhere in the store, Solomon holds Hopi Kachina in his arms. She is seventeen, arthritic, blind in one eye, and needs the rest.

A few weeks later still and Solomon is now officially retired. He sits at his dining room table at home, backlit by a sunny window. The house has a clean, bright earthiness to it. In the living room, an enormous moose antler sits on the floor next to an old grinding wheel. In the hallway is a fold-up traveling organ. On the walls hang intricate masks and paintings from the American southwest. He explains that many of them are from high-end craft shows that he and Barbara frequent. They are both “artsy” people, he says. The studio where Solomon writes his music is the only messy room, filled with instruments and loose-leaf papers. It looks like his old office.

Tatanka sits in Solomon’s lap, his milk chocolate afro bobbing around crazily. Solomon seems serene, unwound, as he talks about his abrupt change of pace.

“My wife needs a lot more care and attention as the years go by, so I’ve been here more with the things she does. Before she was physically impaired she did pottery and stone sculpture but she can’t do that kind of stuff anymore, so what she’s been doing is watercolors and collages.” He explains that he uses his computer to turn Barbara’s creations into reproducible works of art.

“I’m basically filling my time with everything I used to do except working, and it’s less frenetic. I’ve been frustrated the past couple of years that I didn’t have time for music. I didn’t write any songs, didn’t play out much. It takes time to write. You need focused quiet time where you can just sit down and write and play. When I’m writing, time goes faster and I can be screwing around and two hours go by. I’m just not aware of the time, which is nice. It’s a great feeling, it’s a rush. I don’t have to cram into weekends all the stuff I used to have to cram into weekends.”

A few days later, Solomon has a show with his band at a small cafe called Sarah’s Market. He plays guitar and harmonica while his band mates play slide guitar and stand-up bass. In his bolo tie and matching boots, he grins his way through a song he wrote called “Exercise Sucks” and then points out the cash hat. “I thought maybe we could pass the hat around. Be generous. Remember, musicians work hard.”

2 arrested in DC-area marijuana-smuggling scheme

Or

SWAT team raids mayor, shoots family dog because someone mailed them pot

Actually, it was two dogs. Labs, no less. And the family was innocent. What a cock-up! But anyway, whoever wrote that AP headline needs to take a class with Angelia Herrin. That or a good bitch-slap.

HONG KONG (AFP) — Former New York Times reporter Judith Miller on Thursday called on the US Congress to enact a federal shield law that would protect journalists from being forced to disclose their sources.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, who was jailed for 85 days in 2005 after refusing to tell prosecutors which of her sources had outed CIA agent Valerie Plame, said the US was now shrouded in secrecy in the post-9/11 era…

More HERE.

This past Sunday, July 6th, marked the 27th annual Boston Chowderfest – the traditional finale of the Boston Harborfest – where thousands of people pay to sample local chowders and render their verdict. The Boston City Hall Plaza was packed with over 12,000 people earnestly debating the merits of the various chowder selections. They stood in lines up to 50 people deep as a small brass band played and a stilt-walker in revolutionary era garb mingled with the crowd. 

Christopher’s of Maynard (51 Main St., Maynard) successfully defended their 2007 title of “Boston’s Best Chowder” with a light, creamy creation laden with rosemary and pepper. Parker’s Restaurant at the Omni Parker House Hotel (60 School St., Boston) came in second with the richest of the bunch – a chunky chowder so thick it was almost the consistency of soft butter and packed with grit-free clams. Third place was awarded to Farmer Brown’s (210 Maple St., Middleton) for a sweet and chunky, but otherwise unremarkable, chowder that for all we could tell could have come from a can.

The rest of the four chowder selections ranged from should-have-won to widely reviled, the best coming from The Daily Grill (105 Huntington Ave., Boston) which offered Trappey’s Louisiana Hot Sauce and fresh cracked pepper to compliment a hearty, sage-infused soup. An almost perfect chowder, it lost points for grit content.

At 2 p.m., with four hours left to go, the chef of the Daily Grill, Daniel Greenough, looked out over the 100 or so people waiting in front of his booth and said, “I made 300 gallons. I don’t think it’s going to be enough.”

The Oceanaire (40 Court St., Boston) served up a hearty, creamy chowder with a sharp cheese flavor while the Daily Catch’s (323 Hanover St., North End, Boston) was sweet, bready, and occasionally gritty. As the afternoon progressed, word rippled through the crowd that The Chicken Bone (1260 Boylston St., Boston) booth should be avoided.

“It’s like drinking salad dressing,” said Emily, an angular blonde in her early teens.

The one non-restaurant competitor of the bunch, the USS Bataan – an amphibious naval assault ship currently docked in Boston Harbor – served something resembling dish water with bits of fatty bacon floating in it. Luckily for the latecomers, the Bataan ran out of chowder around 3 p.m.

The Harborfest, a “celebration of Boston’s colonial and maritime history,” is a six-day event featuring musical acts and family activities.

SPENCER: honestly, this doesn’t seem like a manufactured controversy, since the New Yorker doesn’t have to gin up gimmicks to sell magazines
plus they probably see themselves as above that
did you read the story? Written by Ryan “Snitch Bitch” Lizza?
MEGAN: They’d have to gin up a controversy to get me to buy it, but I’m the world’s worst person at buying magazines.
I keep trying to read it, but the narcolepsy kicks in.
SPENCER: yeah, i didn’t either
because NO ONE should trust a single thing Lizza writes
not his editors
not his factcheckers
not his readers
not his friends
not his family
MEGAN: Well, Ryan Lizza’s trustworthiness aside, Ryan Lizza doesn’t seem interesting enough as a person to be the secondary focus of the piece.
It’s like, do I really need to read about Ryan Lizza talking about Ryan Lizza researching the story.?
SPENCER: fun fact: in Shattered Glass, the movie about Steve Glass & TNR, there’s a hyper-obnoxious intern who keeps trying to butter Glass up
that dude is based on Ryan
wait, does Lizza talk about how he researched his own piece in the middle of the piece itself?
because if so, i wish there was a loud cackle function in HTML
MEGAN: It’s all like, XYZ told me this, and Obama talked to me about this.
it’s all written in the first person, I find it really annoying and I write constantly in the first person but not about how I met Barack Obama and everyone that’s ever known him talked to Me.
SPENCER: (Yeah, but magazine editors make you do that, so you can signal to your readership that They could never do what Famous Glossy Writers do — it’s the most anti-punk rock thing in journalism)

Read the rest here.

“It had to be in a can,” she says, “And it had to be ice cold. From the minute I got up in the morning, all day long I kept going back for that Pepsi. I didn’t realize I was addicted until I tried to stop drinking it and I couldn’t.”

After struggling through what she describes as “horrible withdrawal,” including headaches, nervousness, and “jitters,” Karen Rizman did stop drinking Diet Pepsi at 25 and now tries to avoid caffeine altogether, with the exception of chocolate.

Rizman’s experience is not unusual because most Americans don’t realize how much caffeine they are consuming, according to the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI). The group has filed a petition with the FDA, asking the government to require food and beverage companies to include caffeine content on their product labels. They have also asked that the FDA conduct a comprehensive investigation into the health effects of caffeine, which is a common additive in sodas and energy drinks, as well as some ice creams and yogurts.

According to the petition, which was signed by 34 scientists and ten health and consumer groups and cites over 40 scientific studies, the risks associated with caffeine include reduced fertility, miscarriage, low birth weight, anxiety, sleeplessness, calcium imbalance – which can contribute to osteoporosis - and unpleasant side effects of ceasing caffeine consumption.

“Caffeine is the only drug that is widely added to the food supply,” said Michael Jacobson, executive director of CSPI, at a press conference in Washington, D.C., according to a press release, “and consumers have a right to know how much caffeine various foods contain. Knowing the caffeine content is important to many people — especially women who are or might become pregnant — who might want to limit or avoid caffeine.”

A chart provided by CSPI lists the caffeine content (mg) per serving of 90 foods and beverages. The products range from a Spike Shooter energy drink with a whopping 300 mg of caffeine per 8.4 oz. serving to Snapple Peach tea with 42 mg per 16 oz. bottle and Sprite which contains no caffeine at all.

Some of the products on the list are more surprising than others. An energy drink called Cocaine may be expected to contain 280 mg of caffeine per 8.4 oz. can, but a sweet, lemony soda like Mountain Dew turns out to contain its fair share as well, with 54 mg per 12 oz. serving. According to CSPI’s press release, Sunkist Orange Soda, which does not appear on the caffeine chart, contains 40 mg of caffeine in every can.

“This all comes down to the consumer’s right to know,” said Lisa Cox, program and policies director at the National Women’s Health Network, according to the press release. “When a food contains an ingredient linked to health problems, labels should disclose to shoppers the amount of that ingredient.”

Not everyone is convinced of the usefulness of caffeine labeling, however. Nicola Ferrante, 33, of Boston, stops at Starbucks for a cup of coffee (320 mg/16 oz.) every morning on her way to work. She thinks that too much is being made of the risks of caffeine.

“It’s like anything else,” she says. “A little bit is good, too much is bad, don’t drink it if you’re pregnant. Caffeine is the least of our problems. I mean, if you’re the kind of person who doesn’t know that Coke has caffeine in it, then you’re the kind of person who doesn’t care anyway.”

But to Karen Rizman, who is raising her 17-year-old son, Matt, to be aware of food additives such as high fructose corn syrup and trans fats, caffeine content labels sound like a good idea.

“I don’t let Matt drink energy drinks,” she says. “I think they’re dangerous. And I just found out that caffeine is one of the main ingredients in Excedrin. Someone told me that, I had no idea. I don’t take it anymore.”

Mustapha, 47, speaks so softly that he can barely be heard over the commotion of the class. He rarely makes eye contact and never loses the hint of a smile around his mouth. A chemistry major in college at Ahmadu Bello University, he received his graduate degree in shipping technology at Maritime Academy of Nigeria and now works as a journalist for ThisDay, a Nigerian newspaper with the tagline, “African views on global news.” He saved for two years to come to Harvard for an eight-week journalism pro-seminar, leaving behind his wife, who works as an immigration official, and five children, ages nine to nineteen.

When asked why he made this trip, he looks at the wall behind me and begins by saying that he wants to sharpen his journalistic skills and improve his career. He will receive higher pay, he says, and more respect if he completes this course. He says that Harvard, in particular, is considered very prestigious and that the newspaper industry in Nigeria is not suffering or going through a rapid technological change the way it is in the United States. There are plenty of advertisers for the more than ten national papers in the country, which are all thriving.

Then, in a voice so quiet that I must ask him to repeat himself, he says that he wants to start his own paper and be a “true journalist.” When asked what this means, he says that most of the national papers in Nigeria primarily cover money and politics and that important issues such as poverty, hunger, and corruption, are largely ignored. He wants to “give voice to the voiceless” by choosing investigative stories for his newspaper that highlight these issues. What was it that caused him to choose this path? He shrugs and looks at the floor. “I just don’t like injustice.”