Richard Conniff's Blog, page 2

Big, Bad & Very, Very Toothy: A Shark’s Tale

by Richard Conniff/The Wall Street Journal

Megalodon lived. Past tense. The largest shark ever, and arguably the largest predator, went extinct 2.6 million or more years ago. And it has stayed that way. But Hollywood sequel makers will be pleased to know that megalodon still somehow manages to kill on average two people a year, according to Tim and Emma Flannery. More on that later.

In “Big Meg: The Story of the Largest and Most Mysterious Predator That Ever Lived,” the Flannerys, a father-and-daughter pair of Australian scientists, provide a more complete and accurate picture of megalodon than you are likely to see on any television or movie screen. The authors tell us, among other things, that megalodon had nurseries in parts of what are now Maryland, South Carolina and Florida; that it was warm-blooded; and that its young were more than 6 feet long at birth. Like some modern sharks, but on a grander scale, megalodon practiced intrauterine cannibalism, and only the strong emerged to see the outside world. The adult megalodon, the Flannerys write, was big enough to be the scourge of the seas and an “emblem of all the unspoken, hidden terrors that haunt our imaginations.”

Just how big? Was it 50 feet long? Or maybe 65? The book is vague on such details for good reason. Not only does megalodon not exist in the modern world; there is also hardly any fossil evidence, apart from its teeth, that it ever existed. Megalodon’s massive body was built on cartilage, not bone, and cartilage does not fossilize well. The Flannerys hold out hope that a “whole-body” megalodon fossil might someday turn up, a result of extraordinary circumstances of preservation. It happened in 2017 for a contemporary, the giant mackerel shark, an extinct ancestor of today’s great white shark. But the lack so far of anything comparable for megalodon means that the Flannerys must often resort to “mights,” “maybes” and “just imagines.”

About megalodon teeth, their account is sharply detailed. Megalodon’s mouth contained about 272 of them, arranged in four rows, rotating forward as the front teeth broke off in heavy use. And heavy use is what they got. Whales were their common prey, according to the Flannerys, and megalodon’s mouth was big enough “to swallow an orca whole.” Biting and shaking its way through such massive prey, a single shark could shed tens of thousands of teeth over its centurylong life. Unlike its cartilaginous skeleton, its arrowhead-shaped teeth were made of unusually hard material and remain scattered abundantly across the planet.

THE FORGOTTEN REFORMER WHO MADE CITIES LIVABLE

Edwin Chadwick, revolutionary thinkerBy Richard Conniff

This article is excerpted and adapted from “Ending E pi demics: A History of Escape from Contagion” (The MIT Press)

It’s almost impossible now, thank God, to imagine the squalor of London and other supposedly civilized cities in the first half of the 19th century. As the rural poor moved to jobs in the factories of the Industrial Revolution, they overwhelmed the available housing and the adjacent, untended, and often uncovered, cesspools. Entire families commonly huddled together in single rooms, even in windowless basements. Overflowing sewage at times made entire cities feel as if adrift on a sea of human waste.

The result was a second revolution, for urban sanitary reform, and it succeeded largely through the outsize influence of one peculiar man. Edwin Chadwick, now mostly forgotten, was a barrister, journalist, and social reformer. From the early 1830s onward, Chadwick campaigned for the British government to intervene in matters of public health and welfare. He promoted essential urban services, including public water supply and sewerage, street cleaning, and garbage removal. Chadwick’s work transformed the character and well-being of cities not just in Britain but, by example, worldwide. Along the way, he helped to establish the basis for the modern liberal state. “Few men have done so much for their fellow-countrymen as Edwin Chadwick,” biographer R.A. Lewis wrote, “and received in return so little thanks.”

This uncelebrated status is no doubt due both to the lowliness of his chief subject — the disposal of human waste — and to Chadwick’s difficult personality. A sanitarian who was a friend described him in the heroic mode: “firm-set massive build,” “resolute expression,” “nose aquiline,” and “the head altogether large, and to the phrenologist finely developed.”

But photographs from the period show a tall, round-faced figure, in mustache and muttonchops, hair smeared in hanks across his balding scalp, peering out from heavy-lidded eyes with something like disdain. Chadwick made a reputation for prodigious energy, and for his command of the facts of any issue he studied. But he was also humorless and uncompromising toward those who disagreed with him. He made little effort to hide his contempt for aristocratic domination or for foot-dragging by corrupt or indifferent politicians.

He was also a bore, “a really outstanding specimen of bore in an age when the species flourished,” according to the otherwise admiring biography by Lewis. “Mr. Chadwick is not an orator,” a friend acknowledged. “When he first gets up to speak without book he looks an orator, but a few moments dispel the illusion.”

Watch Out, Stephen Curry, Moths Have Hand-Eye Coordination, too

A hawkmoth ready to uncurl that proboscis into a nectary (Photo: Anna Stöckl)
by Richard Conniff

I have mixed feelings about sphingid moths, sometimes called sphinx moths because the position their caterpillars commonly assume is said to resemble the Great Sphinx of Giza (but I don’t see it). I prefer to call them hummingbird moths, or just plain hawkmoths. On the one hand, I am deeply prejudiced against some of them for a selfish reason: One of the most dismaying experiences for any vegetable gardener is to step out one morning in late July, just as the luscious and long-awaited tomatoes are coming due–and discover the stems and branches of the tomato plants suddenly stripped bare of leaves. The culprit is the caterpillar of the five-spotted hawkmoth (Manduca quinquemaculata), and they are wonderfully camouflaged to keep their enemies (me, among others) from finding them.

It’s some consolation to find caterpillars after parasitic wasps have already gotten to them. You can see the caterpillar’s body ornamented with the pearly pupae of the next wasp generation. (See the photo at left.) Those I leave where they are, for the budding young wasps to emerge and destroy other tomato hornworms, the ones I haven’t managed to find. The hornworms I find in good health, them I murder.

OK, I’ve gotten that off my chest. The truth of course is that I should not generalize. There are many other species of hawkmoth (1450 of them) that are entirely innocent of molesting my tomato plants. So let’s move on.

I admire hawkmoths mainly for the speed and purposefulness of their flight, the way they whip from plant to plant almost like hummingbirds, with that same motor-like whirring of their wings. Their wingbeat, up to 80 times a second, is actually faster than a hummingbird’s And then there’s the needle-thin proboscis they use for sucking up nectar from flowers. It’s as long as, and sometimes much longer than, the rest of the hawkmoth’s body. 

Watch Out, Steven Curry, Moths Have Hand-Eye Coordination, too

A hawkmoth ready to uncurl that proboscis into a nectary (Photo: Anna Stöckl)
by Richard Conniff

I have mixed feelings about sphingid moths, sometimes called sphinx moths because the position their caterpillars commonly assume is said to resemble the Great Sphinx of Giza (but I don’t see it). I prefer to call them hummingbird moths, or just plain hawkmoths. On the one hand, I am deeply prejudiced against them for a selfish reason: One of the most dismaying experiences for any vegetable gardener is to step out one morning in late July, just as the luscious and long-awaited tomatoes are coming due–and discover the stems and branches of the tomato plants suddenly stripped bare of leaves. The culprit is the caterpillar of the five-spotted hawkmoth (Manduca quinquemaculata), and they are wonderfully camouflaged to keep their enemies (me, among others) from finding them.

It’s some consolation to find caterpillars after parasitic wasps have already gotten to them. You can see the caterpillar’s body ornamented with the pearly pupae of the next wasp generation. (See the photo at left.) Those I leave where they are, for the budding young wasps to emerge and destroy other tomato hornworms I haven’t managed to find. The hornworms I find well fed and in good health, them I murder.

OK, I’ve gotten that off my chest. The truth of course is that I should not generalize. There are many other species of hawkmoth (1450 of them) that are entirely innocent of molesting my tomato plants. So let’s move on.

I admire hawkmoths mainly for the speed and purposefulness of their flight, the way they whip from plant to plant almost like hummingbirds, with that same motor-like whirring of their wings. Their wingbeat, up to 80 times a second, is actually faster than a hummingbird’s And then there’s the needle-thin proboscis they use for sucking up nectar from flowers. It’s as long as, and sometimes much longer than, the rest of the hawkmoth’s body. 

Pining for Winter in New England

Roaring Brook Number 2, which deserves a better name. (Photo: Richard Conniff)by Richard Conniff

It’s a dreary Sunday dawn here in Connecticut, 38 degrees (about 3 degrees Celsius), with rain pouring down, as it has been pouring down for much of the week. In a better world, at this time of year, that rain would have grown up to be snow and to lie for weeks two- or three-feet deep across the frozen countryside. Not now, though. It’s too warm. Like much of New England, I am yearning for winter, which hardly seems to exist hereabouts anymore. 

Last Sunday we got a brief tantalizing taste. Maybe two inches of fresh snow on the ground and the temperature just 26 degrees (-3 C) at midday. I put on my winter jacket for the first time this season and went out with my dog for a walk in the woods. It was glorious. First of all the sound of the snow underfoot, the steady heel-toe crunch of the thin layer of snow on top, and the frozen leaves below. Then the exhilarating sting of cold air on the face.

Scene of the crime (Photo: RC)

The dog led me off the trail to a fresh kill, and because of the contrast with the snow underneath, everything was plainly visible. (I was too busy keeping Jack from scoffing up the bloody remnants to examine it closely. But you can perhaps do your own forensic analysis in these photos.) I liked the reminder of other creatures, predator and prey, trying to eke out their lives here in these woods.

Things that were still among the living also left their marks, like these turkey tracks, in the snow.

Down by the stream that runs through the area, a thin memory of ice had begun to creep out from the shoreline. (See the photo at the top.) But it would go no farther. The stream runs too fast now with its load of runoff. (I was going to say snow melt, but past and future rains were more of a force.) 

The whole experience reminded me of winter hikes I used to go on 60 years ago as a boy in New Jersey’s Ramapo Mountains, tromping in galoshes with my friends through two feet of snow and pretending to be Leni Lenape Indians. My 10-year-old self would undoubtedly scoff at an old fool being thrilled by a hike through the modern, short-lived, two-inch-thick counterpart. But I was thrilled. 

When Even the Animals Are Fake News

The Centaur of Tymfi on display in the Bruce Museum’s “Monsters and Mermaids” show. (Photo: Barnum Museum. Skeleton assembly commissioned by Bill Willers. Photographer: Sklmsta)

By Richard Conniff

Fakes are surprisingly common in the history of species discovery. For all the painstaking realism of his bird paintings, for instance, James John Audubon was a gleeful producer of cryptozoological oddities, mainly to prank a naturalist colleague named Constantine Rafinesque. I have described Rafinesque elsewhere as “a species monger, too drunk on the elixir of discovery to take much care with his work.” He could base a species description on evidence as slender as a reference in somebody else’s writings. Seeing an opportunity, Audubon sketched up a handful of imaginary fish, including one he said had bullet-proof scales. Rafinesque duly proclaimed a new species he dubbed Litholepis adamantinus—meaning roughly “unbreakable stone scales.”

I first got interested in zoological fakes a few years ago, in the course of writing my book The Species Seekers. So I made a point recently to take in an exhibit called “Monsters and Mermaids: Unraveling Natural History’s Greatest Hoaxes.” It runs through February 11 at the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, CT, and it’s mainly the work of the museum’s science curator, Daniel Ksepka, a paleontologist otherwise best known for his research on the evolution of early birds.

The show starts with a fake fishy thing rather different from the one Rafinesque described. Some early nineteenth-century huckster fabricated

We Thought We’d Beat These Three Diseases. Now’s The Time to Finally Stop Them

By Richard Conniff/The New York Times

There was a time not so long ago when preventing epidemic disease was a cause ordinary people embraced and celebrated. When President Franklin D. Roosevelt called on Americans to join the fight against polio, for instance, he reported that envelopes containing “dimes and quarters and even dollar bills” arrived by the truckload at the White House, “from children who want to help other children to get well.” The March of Dimes went on to fund the development of polio vaccines. When one of them, the Salk vaccine, proved effective, in April 1955, church bells rang out nationwide.

Likewise, in the mid-1960s, when the World Health Organization announced its wildly ambitious plan to eradicate smallpox in just 10 years, people rose to the challenge. Small teams bearing vaccines and a simple lancet called the bifurcated needle were soon moving through the afflicted parts of the planet — by camel across the desert in Sudan, by elephant to ford rivers in India, and by all the more familiar modes of travel. People everywhere lined up to get the peculiar dimpled mark of smallpox vaccination, freeing them from the scourge that had been maiming and killing their families for as long as they could remember.

As many as 150,000 men and women at a time worked on the campaign, and with a final naturally occurring case discovered in Somalia in October 1977, they eradicated smallpox in the wild. For veterans of the “order of the bifurcated needle,” as they called themselves, it was the proudest hour of their lives.

It may seem unlikely that we could ever recapture that determination and excitement about standing up together against a deadly disease. Instead of presenting a unified front against Covid-19, we fought bitterly, and three years on, our shared response seems to be a shell-shocked unwillingness to even think about epidemic diseases.

The Next Big Idea Club Picks “Ending Epidemics”

Richard Conniff is an award-winning nonfiction writer. He specializes in the topics of human and animal behavior, with his work appearing in the New York Times, Smithsonian, The Atlantic, and National Geographic, among others.

Below, Richard shares five key insights from his new book, Ending Epidemics: A History of Escape from Contagion.

1. Public health is a personal story for all of us, and we take it entirely for granted.

Just ask an uncle or a grandmother what kind of diseases they grew up with. In my family, for instance, my father and uncle both had polio as toddlers in the 1920s. My uncle got it worse, with legs that were permanently reduced to sticks. He spent the rest of his life walking with the help of arm braces.

Summer was still polio season when I was a toddler. At that time, polio was annually killing more than 3100 people in this country and paralyzing 21,000. But in 1955, Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine became available and people flocked to get it. I was one of them. “Polio season” could now just be called summertime.

Progress against infectious disease accelerated from there. My own kids avoided almost all the childhood diseases that were routine for me. A major international effort also began knocking down childhood diseases, with polio, for instance, eliminated from all but two nations by 2019. Now, kids my grandson’s age are being protected against diseases most parents never heard of, like rotavirus, which used to routinely kill small children.

Think about that. (Continue reading.)

NAMIBIA TAKES A HAMMER TO ITS BELOVED COMMUNITY CONSERVANCIES

Community conservancies have thrived in part by protecting endangered black rhinos (Photo: Getty)

by Richard Conniff/Yale Environment 360

Namibia has always seemed to me to be a wondrous country, and not just for its paradoxical richness of life in a sparse, arid habitat. Its Khoisan people have long regarded themselves as Earth’s oldest humans. (Recent genetic evidence indicates that they may be right.) And the desert is so deeply rooted in the culture that the national rugby team calls itself the “Welwitschias,” after a straggling desert plant that supposedly cannot die, though it looks as though it already has.

What has always seemed particularly wonderful to me is that, after an armed independence movement won Namibia’s freedom from South Africa in 1990, the new nation embraced an extraordinarily humane constitution protecting both the environment and the right of the people to support themselves by sustainable use of the land on which they lived.

Rhino trackers at Desert Rhino Camp in northwest Namibia (Photo: Richard Conniff)

In the starkly beautiful desert landscape of Namibia, on the southwest coast of Africa, I have followed behind as Khoisan trackers conducted a second-by-second forensic reconstruction of a murder scene. (The victim was a young giraffe pounced on by a leopard half its weight.) I have climbed mountainous red sand dunes to watch beetles doing handstands, so fog off the Atlantic could run down their backs to their mouths. And I have listened as a Namibian wildlife guide snapped off the pipe-like branch of a Euphorbia bush and explained how the nearby rhinos had evolved, in the absence of finer foods, to thrive on its milky, poisonous flesh.

The dominant SWAPO political party, formed from the armed independence movement, seemed, when I have visited over the years, to be following through on these commitments. With an area roughly equal to Texas and Louisiana combined, Namibia put more than 20 percent of its land under the control of community conservancies — clusters of subsistence farmers — who began to develop local economies based on wildlife tourism. Another 17 percent of the land area went into national parks. Wildlife populations soared as a result — tripling the elephant population, for instance, and almost doubling the number of mountain zebra, even as wildlife sharply declined elsewhere in Africa.

In a 2014 New York Times article, at the height of the rhino poaching crisis, I described Namibia as “just about the only place on earth to have gotten conservation right for rhinos and, incidentally, a lot of other wildlife.” For its people, too. Conservancy partnerships with tourism lodges and trophy hunting outfitters were already bringing new income to some of Namibia’s poorest and most remote communities. (In a rudimentary office somewhere between Palmwag and Kamanjab, the business manager for the local conservancy once proudly showed me how she totted up that year’s income on an Excel spreadsheet.)

But something has changed in Namibia.

RED MENACE REVEALED! … The True Story of a Leftist Plot to Infiltrate America’s Funny Pages

by Richard Conniff/Yale Alumni Magazine

This story is a bit far afield for this site, and its normal focus on science and the natural world. But sometimes, hey, you need a break. (And, yes, Senator, I am now and for several decades have been a card-carrying member of the left-wing Ivy League conspiracy.)

It was a perfect autumn afternoon in 1969, the beginning of my first year at Yale. The photograph I took, rediscovered more than 50 years later in a folder of negatives, captured an iconic moment in American cultural history, and a transformative one for me. The event was a protest against Yale’s ROTC, the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps, the college-to-military program then under attack nationwide for directly linking campuses to the war in Vietnam.

Students for a Democratic Society—the leftist group—was leading the protest on the steps of the administration building. What seemed extraordinary to me was that they weren’t reciting the usual “Hey-hey, ho-ho” antiwar chants, or waving picket signs. They were singing, and accompanying themselves on banjo, fiddle, washboard, and washtub bass. They introduced themselves as the Yale SDS Jug Band, or at least that’s how I remembered the scene. But when I look back now at my Class of 1973 yearbook, one former bandmember (Laurie Chevalier ’73, on washboard) called it the Yale SDS Scuffle Band, a nice play on the musical term “skiffle” that also hinted at a willingness to engage as needed in short, disorganized street fights.

In my memory, they performed only a single number, sung in calypso mode, and the words of the chorus have stuck in my head ever since:

I’m talkin’ ’bout R-O-T-C,
Keepin’ all the people in slav-e-ry,
Whether you’re black, white, yellow, or brown,
You’re gonna be glad when we shut it down.

I was hooked, as a budding leftist, and took several photos of the scene. It appealed to me partly because the protest sought a highly specific, if largely symbolic, step against a war most of us had come to regard as immoral and illegal. By late 1969, more than 35,000 Americans had died in Vietnam, including over two dozen former Yale students, most of them officers. Vietnamese dead, civilian and military, ran deep into the hundreds of thousands.

That protest was my first encounter with what became, for me, one of the more useful lessons of a college education, though maybe a trivial one in the circumstances: I was impressed by the value of thinking imaginatively and keeping an edge of wit in all things. I was also wowed by the talent on display. I had an SDS friend at Fordham who could rant with the best of them about Trotskyites. But musically? He’d been tossed out of his high school band for barely knowing the D from the G string on bass. These Yale lefties, on the other hand, could pitch and hit.

One other thing caught my eye. A small group of counterprotesters stood just off to one side, evidently enjoying the music, if not the message.  One of them held up a sign: “DON’T PUSH! It’s going anyway.” Yale had in fact already announced the end of its ROTC program. But to protect the scholarships of the handful of active members, Yale chose to delay the actual shutdown until the 1972 graduation. At the time, most of us in the crowd rolled our eyes at the lameness of this counterprotest, as well as at Yale’s gradualist approach. The part of me that lives in a new century wishes all right-wing protests could be this tame, or at least this law-abiding. Also that all leftist protests could be this entertaining. What really impresses me now, though, is the civility and the mutual tolerance on both sides. It seems like such a piece of another time, another century.
 
An email chain led me to Chuck Cohen ’70, who’s playing 12-string guitar in the photo. He assured me that they weren’t singing “The ROTC Calypso” at that moment, because his chord fingering didn’t match that song, and the steel drum was missing. (And what about the atomic kazoo?) Then-lead singer Mark Zanger ’70, who wrote “The ROTC Calypso,” emailed to explain that they were definitely singing a traditional number, “Pity the Downtrodden Landlord.” (“Please open your hearts and your purses, / To a man who is misunderstood.”) That was the only reason they would be down on their knees, for the mock-lachrymose begging at the end of the song. The SDS Scuffle Band, it turns out, had an entire leftist repertoire, plus occasional histrionics.  

But let’s get to the iconic moment in American cultural history.

Zanger was then the most prominent member of SDS at Yale.  At the time, he was widely believed to be the model for “Megaphone Mark” Slackmeyer—a leading character in bull tales, a cartoon drawn by Garry Trudeau ’70, ’73MFA, for the Yale Daily News. In a typical 1969 bull tales, Mark stands alone in front of the college president’s house, bellowing through his megaphone, “Alright, King, this is SDS! We’ve had enough of this R.O.T.C. and classes and authority and stuff!! DO YOU HEAR ME?” King, modeled on Kingman Brewster Jr. ’41, Yale’s politically adroit president of that time, strolls out in his three-piece suit and by the fourth panel has smooth-talked Mark into quivering inanition.

A few months after graduation, Trudeau was sharpening up both his art and his wit, and turning bull tales into Doonesbury, for syndication in newspapers. (Mike Doonesbury, a leading character in the cartoon, was modeled on Trudeau himself. Doonesbury combined the name of Trudeau’s roommate, Charles Pillsbury ’70, with a slang word meaning, roughly, “clueless boob.”) Doonesbury quickly became a national phenomenon, and characters who had formerly wandered the Yale campus strode the national stage via the funny pages of more than 700 US newspapers. (“Funny pages,” noun: archaic term from a time when newspapers, printed on actual paper, used to devote a page or more every day to comic strips.) The comics, as they were also known, served as essential relief from the grim stuff in the news, and a welcome stop en route to the sports pages. Readers followed them faithfully, and rarely complained if the comedy lapsed into the comfortably insipid.   

Doonesbury changed that, introducing political savvy and wit to the funny pages, and enraging some readers. Newspapers at times felt obliged to drop the strip for a day, or slide it over onto the editorial page, due to references to sex, drugs, crime, or all of the above in the lives of various government officeholders. Doonesbury became a must-read commentary during the Watergate scandal and the downfall of the Nixon administration. In one famous strip, from May 29, 1973, Mark Slackmeyer, having traded in his megaphone to become a radio host, delivers a sober account of the alleged crimes of John Mitchell, the attorney general of the Nixon administration. “It would be a disservice to Mr. Mitchell and his character to prejudge the man,” Mark declares in the third panel, “but everything known to date would lead one to believe he is guilty!” Then his eyes go wide with lunatic fervor and he declares, “That’s guilty! Guilty, guilty, guilty!!”

Trudeau was then producing Doonesbury from a dorm room at the top of an entryway in Farnam Hall on the Old Campus, where he served as a freshman counselor while completing his MFA at the Yale School of Art. But the cartoon strip was already moving beyond its original Yale setting and cast of characters into a more adult world.  “The trip from draft beer and mixers to cocaine and herpes is a long one,” Trudeau explained in the early 1980s, “and it’s time they got a start on it.” The list of characters expanded with the news, at times including Vice President Dan Quayle depicted as a feather, Congressman Newt Gingrich as a bomb with a lit fuse, President Bill Clinton as a waffle, and California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger as a groping hand.  

Trudeau’s targets often felt the hit.  After Doonesbury satirized George H. W. Bush ’48—Ronald Reagan’s vice president at the time—as having placed his manhood in a blind trust, Jeb Bush marched up to Trudeau at the Republican National Convention and snarled, “I have two words for you: walk softly.” More manfully, but in the third person, journalist Hunter S. Thompson once threatened to rip out his four-panel tormentor’s lungs.As the cast of characters changed, and the lit fuses sometimes exploded, Megaphone Mark Slackmeyer endured. He got an on-air job at National Public Radio, came out as gay in the 1990s, and went through a marriage and a divorce—all before the Supreme Court decision that recognized same-sex marriages. (If there was a scandal, it had to do with his marrying a conservative Republican.)  Today, Slackmeyer remains a gray-haired guiding presence at NPR, where Trudeau has had cause to reprise that “guilty! Guilty, guilty, guilty!” panel, first during the Reagan Administration Iran-Contra scandal, and again during a 2017 investigation of another president Slackmeyer tended to identify as “that Jackass.”  

The original Megaphone Mark—Mark Zanger—has also endured. He has had a career as an editor and food writer, has written cookbooks, and still leans left. (One reader called his 2003 American History Cookbook “history seen through the eyes of the hungry.”) “While in college,” he concedes, “I was foolish enough to act like a cartoon character, and that helped inspire Megaphone Mark.” But he is reluctant to take too much credit: Mark Rudd, his SDS counterpart at Columbia University, made the front page of the New York Times then and may also have played a part. Zanger suspects Trudeau, “like any artist,” does “not want to be restricted by having a character be somebody in particular. As he went along, he modified characters away from any original models.”

For instance, Brian Dowling ’69, a Yale quarterback and the original model for Trudeau’s B.D., did not serve in Iraq and lose a leg, as B.D. did. That was only a plot twist at a time when Trudeau was focusing on injured veterans. And Zanger would never have married a conservative Republican. Trudeau himself has never shown much interest in these “who’s who” questions. His characters, he has said, are items in the toolbox, to be pulled out and put to work in the service of the story.

In any case, it’s all slipping away into history. Since 2014, Trudeau has produced new cartoons only on Sundays, and Doonesbury’s clout has waned accordingly. Chuck Cohen, the 12-string guitarist in the SDS Scuffle Band, recalls that when he taught religious history at the University of Wisconsin, he could buy credibility with new students by telling them he was not, as rumored, the original model for Zonker Harris, Doonesbury’s dreamy, druggy slacker-in-chief. Then one day, a student raised his hand and asked, “What’s ‘Doonesbury’?”