Later On

I used the Style 3, size 2 shown above—the Style 3, size 1 is just for a size comparison. (2 = larger than 1) Great lather, but really just too much brush. It feels a little along the lines of one person driving a Hummer to the store: it gets you there, but it does seem a tad excessive. I like the smaller brush, perhaps because I lather on my face—but even after the lather is complete, the big brush seems too much.

The iKon did its usual job of smooth, comfortable shaving. I think the iKon is my new nominee for the razor James Bond uses: extremely efficient at getting the job done, but still provides a feeling of smoothness and comfort. It was the usual Swedish Gillette blade.

A splash of Floris JF to complement the Floris Elite soap (which is a very nice soap indeed). And now I scurry about to ready the apartment for the cleaning ladies.

Reader Mel pointed out this useful explanation by Paul Krugman:

I’ve spent a lot of the last several days reading about climate change, extreme weather events, food prices, and so on. And one thing that became clear to me is that there’s widespread misunderstanding of the relationship between the gradual trend of rising temperatures and the extreme weather events that have become so much more common. What I’m about to say may seem obvious, because it is obvious, at least if you approach it the right way; but I still think it needs saying.

So, let’s start with an observation: weather varies. (Duh.) Heat waves and other stuff happens. Think of it in terms of a probability distribution for temperatures, with the area under the curve over some range representing the probability of temperatures in that range in a given place over a given period. And define an extreme event as a case in which the temperature exceeds some threshold. The the picture looks like this:

Now suppose that a warming trend shifts the whole probability distribution to the right — which is what we mean when we talk about climate change. Then the result looks like this:

What happens is that the right tail gets fatter: the probability, and hence the frequency, of extreme events goes up.

Two immediate implications. First, there will still be cold stretches: global warming shifts the distribution, it doesn’t eliminate the left side of the distribution. So there will still be cold spells; that proves nothing.

Second, no individual weather event can properly be said to have been “caused” by global warming. Heat waves happened 30 years ago; there’s no way to prove that any individual heat wave now might not have happened even if we hadn’t emitted all that CO2.

But the pattern should have changed: we should be getting lots of record highs, and not as many record lows — which is exactly what we do see. And we should be seeing 100-year heat waves and similar events much more often than history would have suggested likely; again, that’s what we actually do see.

The point is that the usual casual denier arguments — it’s cold outside; you can’t prove that climate change did it — miss the point. What you’re looking for is a pattern. And that pattern is obvious.

After reading this post at BruceOnShaving.com, I had to try the Otoko Organics shaving soap—and it’s very nice indeed. No perfume fragrance at all, so far as I could detect, but creates a fine lather and it shaves well. Lots of details at the link. Shipment received from Australia in record time—about the same as if I ordered from a domestic vendor.

Three passes with the Pils holding a previously used Swedish Gillette blade, a splash of Stetson Classic, and then I’m ready to study more Spanish.

Barack Obama, for all his Democratic credentials and Constitutional scholar background, has taken quite a regressive stance toward civil liberties, supporting the Presidential Assassination Program (PAP), which operates with no judicial review or due process and allows him to order the murder of American citizens as he wishes, imprisoning people indefinitely (and, in some cases, for life) with no charges, trial, or appeal, refusing to allow recourse to innocents that the US kidnapped and either tortured directly or turned over to our dictator allies for torture, refusing any investigation in wrong-doing by the US government even though such investigation is required by law), and so on. Really, a sorry spectacle and not that different from other authoritarians one could name.

So: why? Why on earth would a person who seems to have good will and who seems to hold decent principles, embrace such totalitarian stances.

A possible reason just occurred to me: What if, when he became President, he was brought into a room and presented with a detailed picture and schedule of what the world is headed for as climate change really takes hold and catastrophic crop failures become common? Certainly all the data are available: we can see and measure what’s happening, we know the cause and we know that nothing will be done, and we see crop failures already happening.

The world is going to become a very ugly place, and surviving governments are likely to have to use strong measures to keep order. So Obama has to take a bitter pill and recognize that these tactics are going to be needed and soon—certainly within a decade, based on what we see happening already.

The question naturally arises: If the nation is truly headed for this sort of catastrophe, why are we not being told? I can think of several possibilities:

First, the powerful seem to have considerable contempt for the powerless, viewing them as some sort of lesser species whose suffering and death doesn’t mean much. If the powerless were really worth anything, the reasoning goes, they would be powerful. And as the income gap between the wealthy and the rest increases—for in the US, money is power—the distance between the powerful and the people increases, and the powerful see no reason to involve the people in decisions that will affect their lives.

Second, many companies are still making big money from industries that are exacerbating the problem, and they want to continue making money. So we see them fighting in public to destroy any efforts to combat global warming, and you can be sure that they are fighting even harder in back rooms with our (seemingly) easily-purchased legislators.

Finally, if people were told what’s coming, they would grow angry and demand changes. Changes!!! The very word strikes terror in the heart of the powerful. They owe their position and power to the status quo, and you can bet that they will fight to retain those. So the first thing is to keep people uninformed, or at the very least ill-informed. And that’s going quite well in the US.

I am learning a lot of things lately: the Mac, Scrivener, Pilates, Spanish, and how to manage my food intake. The Wife pointed out that between the weight loss and the Pilates I seemed to have internalized that I can learn things well if I simply keep at it, working at it over time. Musicians certainly know this, but many adults forget.

The fact is that most adults—particularly those that succeed in getting control of the timing and content of what they do—focus on those things that they do well. And by working at those things daily, they become extremely good at them—good enough that in the world of business they are often rewarded and become specialists of one sort or another.

Then, in later life, they have totally forgotten what it’s like to learn something: the period of confusion and poor performance as you learn new skills and new knowledge, and the gradual slope of improvement.

The result: they start to think that they can’t learn new things, because the experience of learning strikes them as unpleasant (compared to the secure knowledge and expertise and respect they enjoy in their specialty). So arises the notion that elders can’t learn. They can, but they’re not used to it (yet: I’m actually sort of getting accustomed to the feeling that I am confused but working at it).

Of course, some adults do not have the luxury of choosing what they will be working on. For example, when new technology arrives in the office (a new phone system, for example, or new photocopying equipment, or whatever), the clerical staff is told that they will learn it. Training is offered, attendance is mandatory, and the clerical staff works through it and learns. And, in fact, because that staff is often made to learn new things, they are even accustomed to learning.

The executives can avoid this awkwardness. I still remember the president of a company for which I worked, who got a phone call he wanted to transfer, calling out sort of pitifully for his secretary to come in and please transfer the call for him because he didn’t know how to do it. And he didn’t know how to operate a computer, either—not really. He could hunt and peck at a keyboard (he had no keyboarding skills whatsoever) within a program, but to switch to another program would probably require asking his secretary to help him again. He no longer really knew how to learn.

And that’s why the canard that elders cannot learn arose. Elders can learn fine, if they will study regularly.

I just recommended the GOPM approach to someone, and the response I got was positive: the person said that they did indeed like slow-cooker meals, especially in the winter.

Slow-cooker meals are great, but totally different from GOPM cooking. A slow-cooker cooks for hours at a temperature of 200º F (“low” setting) or 300º F (“high” setting). GOPM cooking uses a 2-quart cast-iron Dutch oven and cooks for only 45 minutes at 450º F. Cooking foods for a short time at a high temperature produces very different results from cooking a long, long time at low temperatures. For example, you would not cook a steak in a crockpot.

The GOPM cooking method uses the steam generated by the high temperature to cook the foods enclosed in the pot. (You use very little liquid in this method.) The slow cooker uses hot liquid in which the food is simmered for hours and hours. You can see how that would change the result. [UPDATE: TYD reminded me that slow-cooker recipes quite often do NOT use a lot of liquid: they can cook more like a slow oven. For example, tough cuts such as oxtail and beef, veal, or lamb shank do quite well in a slow cooker, but would be inedible in a GOPM meal, which cooks at a high temperature for a relatively short cooking time.]

So veggies cooked by GOPM come out (to my taste) very nice indeed. The green beans or the broccoli that I use in the top layer are cooked perfectly, and not overdone to softness.

I highly recommend trying a meal using GOPM. You’ll be able to tell the difference. The only way the two could be confused is through the “one-pot” idea, but most of my slow-cooker meals do demand a separate pot for the rice or noodles or whatever—in the GOPM method, those are cooked in with everything else. It truly is a one-pot meal.

Hope this clears that up.

This morning I went for one of the periodic ELG reports that the diet counseling place does, usually after every 10 pounds of weight loss. I have, according to their scale, now lost 60 lbs (though according to mine I’ve lost but 58—but generally they weight me after breakfast and I don’t eat breakfast before the test (and if you’re wondering whether I really eat 2 pounds of breakfast, let me note that I usually drink two one-pint mugs of tea before and during breakfast and "a pint’s a pound the world around").

At any rate, the statistics interest me, and this is my blog, so… I have lost about 6.5 feet of measurement, but this is slightly bogus because that’s the sum of ALL measurements they take, and those measurements are doubled for the arms and legs. So, more realistically, my neck (for example) has gone from 17.5 inches in circumference to 15.5, the size it was when I was in my 20′s.

So, though I still have love handles and clearly have a band of fat around my waist, I’ll probably go to their maintenance program starting 1 March, per my original contract. And if I need to lose a few more pounds, I know now how to do that.

Based on my experience, I highly recommend working with a good diet counselor—one that does not used canned formulas or require the purchase of specific products. I think the plan should be based on the food one gets in the supermarket, since that’s what one will eat after the plan—so he had better know how to manage that.

I have to admit that the money helped, too: I paid $2000 for a 9-month contract. It took my breath away when I was told the fee, but after a moment’s thought I decided that, if the program worked, it was well worth the money. I am still paying the $2400 required out of my pocket, beyond insurance coverage, for the angiogram I had last year. (Fortunately, Stanford Hospitals allows one to pay it off over six months with no additional fees.) $2000 to get my weight into a healthy range and to learn how to keep it there: a bargain.

I know that some view getting help as somehow "cheating" or "using a crutch" (though apparently this applies only to certain kinds of help: it doesn’t apply to, for example, accountants, doctors, dentists and dental hygienists, lawyers, auto mechanics, hairdressers, or any of the other professionals that we call upon to assist us—just to weight loss). OTOH, I had tried it on my own and failed, and in this current program I was fully aware of those points at which I would have said "to hell with it—it’s not working and I want a steak." But then I would think of "my" $2000 and continue.

Then, as I have said, the scales fell from my eyes and I got it. Since then, it’s been easy sailing. And I would never have "gotten it" if I had not continued in the program.

I’m writing a book about the lessons I learned. We got to talking about titles, and I told my diet counselor the old chestnut about the ideal book title developed after looking at titles that sold best: Lincoln’s Mother’s Doctor’s Dog. And that reminded me of when LP records first appeared: suddenly instead of 3 minutes of recorded sound per side, there was 30 or 45 minutes available a side. Businesses frantically tried to fill that time with a wide variety of records—classical works, obviously, and what at the time seemed like large collections of songs. But instructional and documentary records were also very popular, and in that category the proposed best-selling title was Bowl Your Way to Better French Through Civil War Birdcalls.

I have blogged before (here and here) about how global warming and climate change will drastically reduce crop yields, which will inevitably lead to food wars—and since war is terrible destructive, that will likely reduce yields ever more.

Paul Krugman sees the unrest in the Middle East as probably the opening salvo in the food wars:

We’re in the midst of a global food crisis — the second in three years. World food prices hit a record in January, driven by huge increases in the prices of wheat, corn, sugar and oils. These soaring prices have had only a modest effect on U.S. inflation, which is still low by historical standards, but they’re having a brutal impact on the world’s poor, who spend much if not most of their income on basic foodstuffs.

The consequences of this food crisis go far beyond economics. After all, the big question about uprisings against corrupt and oppressive regimes in the Middle East isn’t so much why they’re happening as why they’re happening now. And there’s little question that sky-high food prices have been an important trigger for popular rage.

So what’s behind the price spike? American right-wingers (and the Chinese) blame easy-money policies at the Federal Reserve, with at least one commentator declaring that there is “blood on Bernanke’s hands.” Meanwhile, President Nicolas Sarkozy of France blames speculators, accusing them of “extortion and pillaging.”

But the evidence tells a different, much more ominous story. While several factors have contributed to soaring food prices, what really stands out is the extent to which severe weather events have disrupted agricultural production. And these severe weather events are exactly the kind of thing we’d expect to see as rising concentrations of greenhouse gases change our climate — which means that the current food price surge may be just the beginning.

Now, to some extent soaring food prices are part of a general commodity boom: the prices of many raw materials, running the gamut from aluminum to zinc, have been rising rapidly since early 2009, mainly thanks to rapid industrial growth in emerging markets.

But the link between industrial growth and demand is a lot clearer for, say, copper than it is for food. Except in very poor countries, rising incomes don’t have much effect on how much people eat.

It’s true that growth in emerging nations like China leads to rising meat consumption, and hence rising demand for animal feed. It’s also true that agricultural raw materials, especially cotton, compete for land and other resources with food crops — as does the subsidized production of ethanol, which consumes a lot of corn. So both economic growth and bad energy policy have played some role in the food price surge.

Still, food prices lagged behind the prices of other commodities until last summer. Then the weather struck.

Consider the case of wheat, whose price has almost doubled since the summer. The immediate cause of the wheat price spike is obvious: world production is down sharply. The bulk of that production decline, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture data, reflects a sharp plunge in the former Soviet Union. And we know what that’s about: a record heat wave and drought, which pushed Moscow temperatures above 100 degrees for the first time ever.

The Russian heat wave was only one of many recent extreme weather events, from dry weather in Brazil to biblical-proportion flooding in Australia, that have damaged world food production.

The question then becomes, what’s behind all this extreme weather? . . .

Continue reading.

Thanks to Zach for pointing out this on-line vendor:

Shaveabuck.com – info@shaveabuck.com – 732-239-2607 Eastern time – A very broad selection including items hard to find in the US, at good prices. Includes Arko, Astra, Bea, Boots, De Vergulde Hand, Delong, Derby, Edwin Jagger, Erasmic, Feather, Frank, Godrej, James Bronnley, Kappus, G.B. Kent, Lavanda, Lea, Lightfoot’s, Lord, Malizia, Merkur, Mitchell’s Wool Fat, Mühle, Parker, Pitralon, Rapira, Sabi, Shark, Taylor of Old Bond Street, Timor, Treet, Valobra, Wars, Wilkinson

The Pils travel razor seemed to be somewhat of the same aesthetic as the Joris razor shown, so that’s what I picked to use. It did a fine job, working up a commendable lather from Irisch Moos, which (thanks to a two-day stubble) put plenty of soap on my beard. Then the Joris (palladium plated, no less) went to work: extremely smooth shave—and yet it’s the same head as I used for Friday’s shave, which seemed aggressive enough to be flirting with “harsh”. The difference: Friday I used a new Iridium Super blade, and today I used a new Swedish Gillette blade. The blade does make a difference. The lesson: when you get a new razor, try several different brands of blades to find the one that works best for that razor. (Though, to be truthful, I suspect that the Swedish Gillette blade would outpace the Iridium Super—and most other blades—in any razor. However: YMMV. Different guys respond in strikingly different ways to the same brand of blade—and don’t forget it.)

A splash of Irisch Moos and I’m ready for the day.

I’m making this recipe, but instead of 2 Tbsp (!!!) olive oil, I’m using 2 tsp. I like the bag idea: put dry asparagus in plastic bag with the oil and massage it until all asparagus is coated. I like the recipe because it also uses garlic, lemon juice, etc.

Realpolitik seems to work well in the short run, while in the long run alienating entire populations who tend to judge by actions rather than by (high-flown) words. It also alienates some of the domestic population, which would prefer a government that works to realize (and honor) its values rather than consistently taking the expedient and easy course. But: most politicians seem to be close to terminally stupid, so far as I can tell. So we can expect the practice to continue.

Scott Shane discusses the issue in the NY Times:

If the United States is, as so many presidents have said in so many speeches, the world’s pre-eminent champion of democracy, then why does the drama unfolding in Cairo seem so familiar?

A Washington-friendly dictator, propped up for decades by lavish American aid as he oversees a regime noted for brutality, corruption and stagnation, finally faces the wrath of his people. An American administration struggles over what to say, what to do and what to expect if the strongman is toppled.

The agony of Hosni Mubarak’s Egypt raises again the question of whether such a pattern can ever be broken. More than mere misjudgment or duplicity is behind it; the embrace of dictators has been so frequent over the last half-century that it obviously results from hard-headed calculation.

Every country has both values and interests. Sometimes they coincide — for example, promoting human rights can help combat terrorism — and sometimes they conflict. What makes the United States stand out, perhaps, is how frequently American officials proclaim their values to the world, setting themselves up for charges of hypocrisy when a policy is expedient rather than idealistic.

Supporting Egypt’s military-led regime over four decades, first under Anwar el-Sadat and then Mr. Mubarak, offered strategic benefits to seven American presidents. They got a staunch ally against Soviet expansionism, a critical peace with Israel, a bulwark against Islamic radicalism, and a trade- and tourist-friendly Egypt. What they did not get was a functioning Egyptian democracy. The apocryphal comment about a foreign strongman often attributed to Franklin Delano Roosevelt sums it up nicely: he may be a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch.

History is rich with precedents. In 1959, there was Fulgencio Batista of Cuba, darling of American corporations and organized crime, fleeing with an ill-gotten fortune of $300 million as Fidel Castro’s troops reached Havana.

In 1979, it was Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, the shah of Iran, abandoning the throne in the face of a revolt two years after President Jimmy Carter toasted his country as “an island of stability.”

In 1986, the turn came for

Continue reading. And check out the other links in the article sidebar:

• West Backs Gradual Egyptian Transition (February 6, 2011)

• Egypt Stability Hinges on a Divided Military (February 6, 2011)

• The Lede Blog: Updates From Day 12 in Egypt (February 5, 2011)

• Week in Review: 2 Detained Reporters Saw Police’s Methods (February 6, 2011)

In particular, look at this graphic and note how many of the harsh, oppressive, corrupt, torture-prone governments are US allies—and of course, the US turns to them for torture. (Although Barack Obama has promised that the US itself will no longer torture, there are problems: 1) Barack Obama has frequently made promises that he promptly broke (beginning, I think, with his solemn promise to vote against telecomm immunity); and 2) I would be a large amount that the US continues to ship kidnap victims and other captives to such countries to be tortured.)

Interesting, and you can download a podcast at the link:

Kevin Kelly should know better, but boldly, brassily, (and totally incorrectly, I’m sure), he said this on NPR:

“I say there is no species of technology that have ever gone globally extinct on this planet.”

What does that mean? I asked him. (Kevin, among other things, is founding editor of Wired Magazine and runs a very popular blog, called Cool Tools, that reviews new gadgets.)

That means, he said, “I can’t find any [invention, tool, technology] that has disappeared completely from Earth.”

Nothing? I asked. Brass helmets? Detachable shirt collars? Chariot wheels?

Nothing, he said.

Can’t be, I told him. Tools do hang around, but some must go extinct.

If only because of the hubris — the absolute nature of the claim — I told him it would take me a half hour to find a tool, an invention that is no longer being made anywhere by anybody.

Go ahead, he said. Try.

If you listen to our Morning Edition debate, I tried carbon paper (still being made), steam powered car engine parts (still being made), Paleolithic hammers (still being made), 6 pages of agricultural tools from an 1895 Montgomery Ward & Co. Catalogue (every one of them still being made), and to my utter astonishment, I couldn’t find a provable example of an technology that has disappeared completely.

And Kevin continues to insist he is right. In his new book What Technology Wants, he says: . . .

Continue reading.

I don’t watch football, but I saw something on-line that makes me believe that the Big Game is today. (Sports offers a limitless supply of Big Games, all of which seem to me extremely similar.) But I have a lot to do even without a TV: more Spanish, clean up the apartment, shop for more one-pot meals (this week I am trying eggplant and will use miso in some of them), take out garbage, bring up recycling, count out meds, etc. Busy day, busy day. No time to fix dessert. Fortunately, I don’t eat dessert.

Found it at last:

To get accents on the Mac, hold down the Option key, and while holding it down, type the letter e; then release those keys and type the letter that you want the accent to appear on:

• á = Opt + e, then a
• é = Opt + e, then e
• í = Opt + e, then i
• ó = Opt + e, then o
• ú = Opt + e, then u

For the ñ, hold down the Option key while you type the n; release and type n again.

• ñ = Opt + n, then n

To place the diaeresis over the u, hold down the Option key while pressing the u key; release and type u again.

• ü = Opt + u, then u

The inverted punctuation marks are achieved as follows:

• ¡ = Opt + 1
• ¿ Opt + shift + ?

UPDATE: Here‘s what seems to be the complete story on OS X (is that pronounced “oh-ess-ex” or “oh-ess-ten”?) and foreign-language alphabets. Weird that Esperanto is not included. It has only six diacritics, which I think would be easy to include. Bad move, Apple.

This is nice: sitting comfortably in my chair, a large (1 US pint) mug of hot tea (Barry’s Gold) beside me, writing a post. My morning routine is now pretty well fixed: I get up, weigh (192.2 lbs currently), make tea and get breakfast going (oat groats with some turmeric, put on the range with cold water over low heat and leave it alone for 45 minutes to heat up and simmer), and then sit in my chair with my lap desk and write a letter or two.

Then the bell goes off, so I go in and add one or two chopped hard-boiled eggs and a splash of pepper sauce to the oats (which are cooked with turmeric, BTW), and eat that while I (now) read the news on my new notebook. (Frank Rich has a good column today in the NY times on how what we know of the world gets censored by corporate decisions rather than government actions, but starting today mostly I struggle with ElPais.com.) Then I resume writing my letter(s). Once that’s done, on the Nordic Track for 30 minutes. I’m still listening to Don Quixote, now on disk 14 (of 35). Then shower, shave, and meet the day.

You can see why getting up at 5:00 a.m. is helpful.

I can see now that this new notebook will be INVALUABLE for my Spanish course: so many resources are now on-line (including homework assignments, exercises, dictionaries, verb conjugators, etc.) that working at the computer is essential—and la profesora told us to bring our notebook computers to class this Thursday so they could be “set up” (whatever that means). That was another stimulus to making the purchase, but now I see, having spent the afternoon and evening working at this, that it would not have been pleasant at all to have to stay in the study whenever I worked on Spanish exercises.

Staub wins hands down. Better construction, better design, better all round. The Wife and I did some comparing at Williams-Sonoma, which carries both.

Sounds good:

The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival

by John Vaillant

A review by Nathan Weatherford

Tigers are cunning creatures, and the structure of John Vaillant‘s The Tiger does their craftiness credit. The subtitle reads "a true story of vengeance and survival," words chosen to immediately grab one’s attention, aided by the ragged, red claw marks scratched into the cover behind them. But, while visceral thrills abound throughout the book, what Vaillant is attempting proves much more elusive (and ultimately more compelling) than any mere story of bloody attacks.

The drama surrounding the titular tiger unfolded in the far east of Russia during the late 1990s, in and around the village of Primorye. At the beginning of the book, we’re introduced to Yuri Trush, area head of Inspection Tiger, a group charged with ensuring that these endangered animals are protected in the wild. He’s called upon to investigate a brutal mauling: Vladimir Markov, a hunter/poacher living in the wilderness, has been killed and completely dismembered by what could only be a tiger. Vaillant doesn’t mince words when it comes to describing these fiercely beautiful, frighteningly deadly creatures:

To properly appreciate such an animal, it is most instructive to start at the beginning: picture the grotesquely muscled head of a pit bull and then imagine how it might look if the pit bull weighed a quarter of a ton. Add to this fangs the length of a finger backed up by rows of slicing teeth capable of cutting through the heaviest bone. Consider then the claws: a hybrid of meat hook and stiletto that can attain four inches along the outer curve, a length comparable to the talons on a velociraptor.

This description comes along fairly early in the text, a calculated move that puts the proper fear in the reader and serves to make the rest of the story that much more involving.

Prior to reading the book, I assumed the plot would go as follows: scary tiger kills hunter; remaining hunters want vengeance, decide to track tiger, and kill it. An interesting story for its remote location, and not lacking in suspenseful moments, but a story containing nothing new that would distinguish it from any other predator/prey tale. However, Vaillant uses this particular tiger incident as a springboard to discuss everything from anthropology to psychology. I found his meditations on the relationship between tigers and the people of Primorye fascinating. There, tigers have enjoyed an almost god-like status for as long as humans have been in contact with them, and it’s generally accepted that if you harm a tiger, you’ve signed your own death warrant, for there’s no escaping such an absolute killer. One of the most chilling scenes in the book unfolds when Trush first arrives at Markov’s cabin to investigate the death scene and finds a snowy patch melted right next to his door (proof that the tiger had been lying in wait for Markov for quite some time, as temperatures are usually well below zero there). Markov’s tracks lead straight to this patch, almost as if the tiger was compelling him to meet his doom.

Vaillant also does a great job of establishing the internal conflict of the tiger poacher. To kill a tiger is not only a violation of national laws — it would be an easy decision were this the case, as the Russian government has enough trouble enforcing law in the wilderness of the far east, and tigers are extremely valuable on the black market (all told, a complete corpse can fetch around $50,000); for natives of Primorye, it goes against their core beliefs about the tiger’s mythic essence. Tigers and humans are supposed to avoid one another, to evince a mutual respect of each other’s powers and territories. Unfortunately, Primorye’s economy has been so bad for so long that, for many, it’s their only chance at hitting the jackpot and living above a bare subsistence level. When shooting a tiger, poachers shoot to kill, and must be prepared to face the consequences if and when they miss.

By the end of the book, Vaillant has successfully shown that, while tigers may not be as smart as humans in most ways, when it comes to stalking and killing prey, they’re still able to turn circumstances to their advantage quite easily (and with a conniving zeal bordering on the magical). It’s not hard to see why early humans developed such primal awe for these creatures that can literally ensnare even the most knowledgeable hunter in a perfect ambush, and this awe has passed down through countless generations. The Tiger is proof positive that it can still manifest itself today, even at a book’s remove.

And, after all, one of the benefits the US has realized in its support of Egypt is that Egypt is quite willing to imprison and torture the people the US sends to it. Our government just loved that it could have people tortured in a location less prone to investigation than, say, Guantánamo (though the US tortured people to death there, with no serious repercussions on the torturers, thanks in large part to Barack Obama’s generosity of spirit toward those who torture people).

Souad Mekhennet and Nicholas Kulish report their own direct experience of how the Egyptian government treats its people:

CAIRO — We had been detained by Egyptian authorities, handed over to the country’s dreaded Mukhabarat, the secret police, and interrogated. They left us all night in a cold room, on hard orange plastic stools, under fluorescent lights.

But our discomfort paled in comparison to the dull whacks and the screams of pain by Egyptian people that broke the stillness of the night. In one instance, between the cries of suffering, an officer said in Arabic, “You are talking to journalists? You are talking badly about your country?”

A voice, also in Arabic, answered: “You are committing a sin. You are committing a sin.”

We — Souad Mekhennet, Nicholas Kulish and a driver, who is not a journalist and was not involved in the demonstrations — were detained Thursday afternoon while driving into Cairo. We were stopped at a checkpoint and thus began a 24-hour journey through Egyptian detention, ending with — we were told by the soldiers who delivered us there — the secret police. When asked, they declined to identify themselves.

Captivity was terrible. We felt powerless — uncertain about where and how long we would be held. But the worst part had nothing to do with our treatment. It was seeing — and in particular hearing through the walls of this dreadful facility — the abuse of Egyptians at the hands of their own government.

For one day, we were trapped in the brutal maze where Egyptians are lost for months or even years. Our detainment threw into haunting relief the abuses of security services, the police, the secret police and the intelligence service, and explained why they were at the forefront of complaints made by the protesters.

Many journalists shared this experience, and many were kept in worse conditions — some suffering from injuries as well.

According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, over the period we were held there were 30 detentions of journalists, 26 assaults and 8 instances of equipment being seized. We saw a journalist with his head bandaged and others brought in with jackets thrown over their heads as they were led by armed men.

In the morning, we could hear the strained voice of a man with a French accent calling out in English: “Where am I? What is happening to me? Answer me. Answer me.”

This prompted us into action — pressing to be released with more urgency, and indeed fear, than before. A plainclothes officer who said his name was Marwan gestured to us. “Come to the door,” he said, “and look out.”

We saw more than 20 people, Westerners and Egyptians, blindfolded and handcuffed. The room had been empty when we arrived the evening before.

“We could be treating you a lot worse,” he said in a flat tone, the facts speaking for themselves. Marwan said Egyptians were being held in the thousands. During the night we heard them being beaten, screaming after every blow. . .

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