Monday, June 1, 2009
My story from this week’s New York magazine, in which Mr. Lewis helms the squad in a tense late-inning affair, and I draw the ire of parents in the Berkeley-Albany Softball League for nine and ten-year-olds.
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Friday, April 24, 2009
[If you are a New Yorker subscriber, you can read it here. For a PDF copy, click here.]
THE NEW YORKER
February 23, 2009
Shoot!
An Appalachian gunsmith’s robot army.
BY EVAN RATLIFF
At the age of seventy-four, Jerry Baber has winnowed his primary interests in life to four subjects: shotguns, robots, women, and cars. When Baber is holding forth—his default mode of communication being the filibuster—his conversation tends to fall somewhere among these categories. Often his passions intersect, as in the question of whether or not a Corvette is an ideal car for picking up women. (It is.) Similarly, Baber might be discussing his love of robots and shotguns, and whether, by combining the two, he is helping to shape the future of warfare from his garage. (He is.)
Baber, an engineer by training, is an expert in investment casting—a method for making small pieces of finely shaped metal. He lives down the road from the Bristol Motor Speedway, in Piney Flats, Tennessee, a hilly town dotted with cattle farms, just south of the Virginia border. There he operates a small foundry, where he manufactures gun parts. Over the years, he has contributed triggers, barrels, hammers, and other components for half a million firearms. “I probably know as much, or more, as any one single person about manufacturing guns,” he told me one afternoon, while driving through the Appalachian foothills in his cherry-red Chevy Impala. (”The best buy on the road today, barring none.”) Post continued…
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Wednesday, April 15, 2009
UPDATE 2: Thanks to everyone who attended, and also to all the contributors for their truly fantastic pieces. The whole thing surpassed our wildest expectations. If you couldn’t make it, you can check out the Chronicle’s write-up here. And for those curious about the final lineup, here was the Table of Contents. And keep watching the Pop-Up site!
SHORTS:
DESIGN
What the World Needs Now
By Allison Arieff
MUSIC
Psych Garage Rock
By Jennifer Maerz
FOOD
Chinese Food And The Economy
By Andrew Lam
TRAVEL
Airsickness
By Joshua Davis
FAITH
Awesome Pope
By Roman Mars
PRODUCTS
Mobility
By Steven Leckart
FEATURES
LITERATURE
This Grubbing Art
By Jon Mooallem
MUSIC
Doom Versus Lil Wayne
By Brandon Mcfarland
SOCIETY
Foreclosure
By Todd Hido
SPORTS
Fear
By Jennifer Kahn
HISTORY
A Delta Town
By Sandy Tolan
CULTURE
Pink By Peggy Orenstein
SCIENCE AND NATURE
The World at Night
By Christina Seely
CULTURE
STRAND: A Natural History Of Cinema
By Christian Bruno
SOCIETY
Born By Tania Ketenjian And Ahri Golden
SCIENCE AND NATURE
Termites By Lisa Margonelli
BIOGRAPHY
A Soldier’s Tale
By Larry Sultan
SOCIETY
Health Care
By Alex Gibney
Q&A
Megan Prelinger
With Todd Lappin
THE CITY
The Commissioner
By Nathanael Johnson
SCIENCE AND NATURE
Botany, The Movie
By Michael Pollan
THE ARTS
One Big Soul
By The Kitchen Sisters
MEMOIR
The Devil’s Water
By Glynn Washington
Post continued…
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Tuesday, April 14, 2009
It’s difficult to say for certain, but if you look closely at the illustration immediately to the left, you might conclude that it is a rendering of a man, in silhouette, bent over and having just vomited (and quite possibly standing in the results). That man is me. The fact that this is an apt illustration for the story to which it is attached is unlikely to encourage you to read the story. But so it is.
A while back, Outside GO magazine asked me if I had any travel philosophy that I might spin into an essay for their “Ready to Go” column. It turns out that I do have one, of sorts, and you can read about it in their Spring 2009 issue, or online here. To be honest I hadn’t grandiloquently referred to it as the One Great Thing(tm) philosophy before, and I often wondered whether it was driven more by laziness than wisdom. But I do practice it, and it works for me.
Lost in the editing was my disclaimer/hedge that while I have been on some rough trips, I haven’t been to any truly horrible places nor witnessed truly horrible things. I’m not, for instance, a war reporter. So take my travel wisdom, such as it is, as the musings of only a pseudo-professional journeyman.
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Thursday, April 9, 2009
On the heels of the stunning success of Marley and Me: Life and Love with the World’s Worst Dog and Dewey: The Small Town Library Cat Who Touched the World, comes a new tale of an animal connection, a gossamer love, and a lesson you thought you’d never have to learn, in:
Mongo: The Animal that Taught Me Things and Changed Lives
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Monday, March 9, 2009
Update: You can listen to the segment here.
I’ll be on NPR’s “Day to Day” tomorrow, discussing Jerry Baber’s vision for an armed robotic army.
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Thursday, February 19, 2009
In my recent New Yorker story (still just an abstract online), about Jerry Baber’s shotgun-toting robots, I describe a few of Baber’s demonstration videos — some of which have been viewed a couple million times on YouTube. But it’s hard for a paragraph to do them justice, so I’m including here a sampling of my own favorite Baber vids (in addition to the one I posted yesterday, which gives a nice overview of the AA-12 in action).
First, this surprisingly little-viewed footage covers the entire armed robot “family”:
Post continued…
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Wednesday, February 18, 2009
Obama’s signature on the stimulus bill yesterday brought with it further complaints that the new administration isn’t living up to its transparency pledges. It seems that the White House is having trouble squaring the need for emergency legislation with their explicit promise to post bills for five days before the President signs them. A better question, which Micah Sifry raised again last week, might be: what’s the point of fulfilling this promise? Any useful public input into the process would need to happen before the bill hits the President’s desk.
But with the stimulus bill’s approval also comes the full launch of Recovery.gov, which holds out hope for the kind of transparency we actually need. Naturally, the site features Obama’s trademark blue-box Web design. And some of the initial features like the spending breakdown charts and the recovery timeline are interesting, as others have observed.
But the true measure of the site will be in the amount and the detail of the data, about how the money is actually spent and how many jobs are actually created. Post continued…
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Tuesday, February 17, 2009
“Shoot!,” my latest piece for The New Yorker, hit the streets today. It’s available to subscribers on the Web, but everyone else will have to shell out for a copy, retro-style. It’s a profile of one Jerry Baber, an engineer from Piney Flats, Tennessee, and his work. That work being the making of gun parts, and from those parts building the AA-12 — a stainless steel fully-automatic 12-gauge shotgun — and with that shotgun helping to create several small, fully-armed and remotely-controlled air and ground robots that he believes will change the future of warfare.
As Baber likes to say of his creations, which he keeps in his workshop and often unleashes in his backyard, “I asked them what they wanted for Christmas, and they said, ‘bullets and batteries.’”
I’ll be posting some of Baber’s videos here, along with some additional passages that didn’t make the article’s final cut. For now, I’ll leave you with a little introduction to the AA-12:
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Wednesday, February 11, 2009
At yesterday’s press conference describing the administration’s new “financial stability plan” for the banking system, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner offered what seems to be the obligatory new Web site for any Obama administration proposal:
Our work begins with a new framework of oversight and governance of all aspects of our Financial Stability Plan.
The American people will be able to see where their tax dollars are going and the return on their government’s investment, they will be able to see whether the conditions placed on banks and institutions are being met and enforced, they will be able to see whether boards of directors are being responsible with taxpayer dollars and how they’re compensating their executives, and they will be able to see how these actions are impacting the overall flow of lending and the cost of borrowing.
These new requirements, which will be available on a new website FinancialStability.gov, will give the American people the transparency they deserve.
(Clicking over there a few minutes ago, I found a text-only “coming soon” page, with links to Geithner’s remarks. In a way, the page echoes the lack of detail critics observed in the speech itself.) FinancialStability.gov thus joins Recovery.gov, the designated future source of stimulus bill spending, and Astrongmiddleclass.gov, a site that’s meant to provide info on the Vice President’s middle class task force. The former sits idle, awaiting instructions that will presumably come with the passage of the bill. The latter redirects to a section of the White House Web site, and contains the same Obama-esque design. All this Web building, but to what end? Post continued…
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