Brendan I. Koerner's Blog, page 83

Bulletproof: Jimmy Rasta and the Malaitans

The long spell of political violence that rocked the Solomon Islands last decade, commonly referred to as "The Tensions," is an episode we know far too little about. We were thus delighted to stumble across this excellent post-mortem from New Zealand's Sunday Star-Times, which details how the conflict's aftermath still lingers in a major way. Like much of the best non-fiction, it combines general history with the narrative of a single man: feared warlord Jimmy "Rasta" Lusibaea, who led an...

Giving the Junta a Pass

The recent Nigerien coup has put the rest of the world—or at least the part that swears love for democracy—in something of a quandary. Out deepest political principles compel us to oppose the use of force in obtaining power, especially when the afflicted regime was selected at the ballot box. Yet if the old guard was deeply rotten, do we really have the moral authority to condemn non-democratic change? Especially if, as in Niger, the incoming junta seems significantly less toxic than what it ...

Working the Lede

By the time this post goes live, we'll hopefully be halfway through the lede on our next Wired opus. Though given our lackluster writing speed these past few days, we're starting to wonder if we'll ever get through this beast. Seriously, few things are more discouraging than closing your laptop at day's end and realizing that hours worth of your finest mental efforts resulted in the product of a mere 200 words—and mediocre words, at that.

On the other hand, yes, we realize there are far, far...

Let It Grow

Whenever we find ourselves wandering around a massive Chinese supermarket, we inevitably gawk at the price of dried abalone. The delicacy has never crossed our lips thanks to its exorbitant cost. But millions of Asian consumers are willing to fork over the pretty penny, in part due to the marine snail's reputation as an aphrodisiac.

That demand has caused serious problems in South Africa, where Chinese triads poach thousands of tons of abalone each year, often by swapping methamphetamine for...

That's What You Get for Not Hailing to the Chimp

We have never attempted to conceal our fascination with movies starring non-human primates. That quirk of our character shines through yet again in this week's Bad Movie Friday installment, featuring the 1951 Ronald Regan vehicle Bedtime for Bonzo. Suffice to say that the trailer above makes us weep for the scientific literacy of Eisenhower Era schoolchildren, as Bonzo is unfortunately referred to as a monkey rather than a chimpanzee. Critics of the day, however, seemed more concerned with...

A Taxidermist's Best Friend

Nearly a year ago, we marveled at the way in which ancient physicians used ant jaws as sutures. Blame our childhood Flintstones habit, but we have a soft spot for techniques that require the assistance of live animals. And so imagine our glee upon discovering the role that dermestid beetles play in the twin disciplines of taxidermy and fossil cleaning.

We should probably take a step back for a moment and recount how we stumbled upon this wondrous scrap of knowledge. It came up during our...

Echoes of the Empire

This will be our last Ug99-related post, we promise. But before we ended our brief run of bonus material related to "The Red Menace", we thought we'd shout out one of the potential heroes of this story: the late A.E. Watkins, a British botanist who spent much of the 1930s roaming the globe in search of wheat varieties. The desiccated seeds of these wheats are now stored at the John Innes Centre in Norwich, England.

Of what possible interest to science could samples of archaic Cypriot...

Nothing Like the First Time

In researching our forthcoming Wired piece on drug and alcohol abuse, we've found ourselves keenly interested in the tales that addicts tell about their first inebriatory experiences. One common thread we've found is a sense that the first drink or dose provided something that the person had always been searching for—the intoxicant made them whole, in an odd way. And though it is certainly a cliché, these afflicted souls can spend lifetimes trying to recapture that sensation of wholeness.

The ...

The Undertow

Already plugging away on our next Wired feature, this time about addiction rather than wheat-devouring fungi (or, for that matter, the creative benefits of social media. Today's outline day, which is always a chore—envisioning the structure of a lengthy magazine piece requires even more mental bandwidth than we usually utilize. Fortunately, we've got The Skatalites to maintain our neural energy. We actually fell in love with this track by listening to Madlib's Blunted in the Bomb Shelter

Using the Red Menace Against the Reds

One of the most interesting things about Ug99, the fungus that is currently threatening the world's wheat supply, is how it managed to sneak up on us. For nearly four decades, the disease that the Puccinis graminis pathogen causes, known as stem rust, was little seen in the wild, and certainly no great peril to farmers. That's because of the heroic efforts of Dr. Norman Borlaug and his acolytes, who managed to imbue the world's wheat with genes capable of resisting P. graminis. So as early...