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This is just a quick update to document some of the work happening recently in the bavacade. It has a been a bit of catch as catch can given how busy the last month has been with the Reclaim open conference the and coming virtual event in July. That said, I’ve been sneaking in work here and there in the mornings, and as usual it adds up. I already blogged about the Yie-Ar Kung-fu custom cabinet project, and will be a summer long endeavor, but it’s very exciting. I also documented some of my work a couple of week’s ago testing various parts I bought in the US in the “Arcade Therapy” post, so things are definitely moving along.
More recently I have been testing some spare boards I have, namely a spare Make Trax board as well as spare Super Cobra board. This was also part of my attempt to start organizing all my parts and spares in the basement and get some semblance of order. I find testing and labeling when things worked saves me a ton of time, and some of the metadata on the boxes noted that these boards were questions marks. Also, I was looking to test a Crush Roller board in Make Trax I was sure I’d bought and brought to Italy over, but turns out I am either delusional or simply left it in Fredericksburg. Either way, because I’m obsessed I bought another Crush Roller board I found for a decent price in Germany along with a spare Moon Cresta board. The latter board is for the cocktail cabinet in Zach Davis is minding for me in Portland, Oregon, and I want to install and test the high score save kit on this one before shipping it back once I am in New Orleans next month.
The mint Moon Cresta Cocktail machine in residence at Cast Iron Coding’s HQ
Anyway, back to the spare Make Trax and Super Cobra boards. The Make Trax spare works, but the sound is noisy. It’s as if the sound pot is not working correctly and there it is too loud and scratchy, so will need to track that down a new potentiometer (pot) and see if tracing the audio gives me any insight. This board will be the first real PCB work (besides my botched Stargate repair attempts) I’ve attempted in earnest, and I’m hopeful it’s the start of some basic board work.
Stargate Yellow Screen of Death
If it goes well, the second project will be Super Cobra, which has an issue with the high score save kit. There are weird special characters in the high score save (HSS) kit and free play is not working. When I substituted the original roms—this board has several ROMs removed given they are programmed on the HSS kit—and Z80 chip from the working board the special characters went away. That said, there was then a strange rebooting issue with the game that did not happen with HSS kit in, so I’m going to buy new chips and burn the Super Cobra roms (a first for me). After that, I’ll try to track down the random rebooting issue, which is definitely an issue I can isolate to that board, should be fun!
Shot of Super Cobra with weird special characters in high score
As far as other work, I am making headway on monitor chassis repair. I had the spare Hanterex Polo in Cheyenne sent in for diagnosis given the original is stuck in the US on what’s shaping up to be an almost a 6-month wait, which I’m not thrilled about. I’ll keep pushing on the US repair, but in the meantime if the spare board is fixed here in Italy I can finally get this game back online. If that happens, then I’m just one G07 chassis and one K4600 chassis away from having everything running. I was able to repair the Condor G07 chassis that was dead by doing a cap kit, swapping out a new B+ filter cap as well as a horizontal width coil, and the chassis is working pretty well, but there’s a slight undulating wave that Tommaso tells me is good enough, but it’s annoying me, so I do think I need to replace all the adjustment pots, especially for vertical linearity and vertical hold.
In fact, I was certain I bought spare G07 pots, but I can’t find them for the life of me (part of the quest for order undertaken this week), so I’ve been parting out one of my extra, non-working G07 chassis. I’m also waiting on some 1.25 AMP fuses that should come today to try and get the chassis that came out of Pole Position working again. I think this chassis has either a bad flyback or a bad voltage regulator given there has been a recent cap kit done already. I might also need to swap the B+ filter cap. If that works, it will be put in Robotron, which leaves only the K4600 chassis for Challenger (I put Challenger‘s 4600 into Venture to get that game up and running) to repair. I’m not sure what is up there cause I swapped flyback and there was a recent cap kit, so a bit perplexed, but hopefully we some poking around and testing that will be the final piece of the puzzle. This is where the chorus sings, “Hope springs eternal in the bava heart.”
Cracks in the Make Trax control panel overlay
Cracks in the Make Trax control panel overlay
Finally, I have the Make Trax cabinet totally stripped and with Alberto to add wheels because every game will be on wheels sooner than later in the bavacade. The cabinet, overall, is close to mint save the control panel overlay which cracking. When Tim and I were getting Reclaim Arcade up and running I came across an original control panel overlay for this game and snagged it, it was one of the things that came over with the container so I asked Alberto iof he could remove the old one and add this one, and as he says to everything, “No problem!” He’s the best! He removed the old one, which by all accounts from Tim is a totally nightmare, and got it sanded and cleaned up.
Sanded Make Trax control panel ready for the like-new original overlay
After that, he put on the new overlay and it looks like new! So good. Sometimes those things I bought that I thought “Will I use this” are now almost all in use, and that makes me happy.
Alberto’s work on these cabinets continues to blow my mind, this control panel is, indeed, like new thanks to his craftsmanship
I think the next game to go on wheels will be Elevator Action, so will start taking that one apart, and that will mean 16 of the 30 games in the bavacade will be on wheels, and that means I am have crossed the half-way mark, which is encouraging progress! It also means I will have stripped almost every game down to just the cabinet if I manage to get wells on all of them. That’s pretty awesome.
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Long before the 1947 Roswell incident brought “little green men” into the public consciousness and prompted an explosion in UFO sightings, writers and scientists have speculated about the existence of life beyond our planet. H. G. Wells laid the groundwork for modern science fiction with novels like The War of the Worlds (1898), one of the first books to imagine an extraterrestrial invasion. Before Wells, Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli (1835-1910) sparked the imagination by discovering “canals” on Mars. But for the first recorded instance of humanity pondering the possibility of alien life, we have to go all the way back to ancient Greek and Roman times. In the first century B.C., Roman poet Lucretius wrote, “Nothing in the universe is unique and alone and therefore in other regions there must be other earths inhabited by different tribes of men and breeds of beast.” Not exactly a controversial supposition; still, whether or not such tribes have come to our planet remains impossible to prove, and those who claim to have encountered alien beings have long been dismissed.
That said, in recent years, the concept of otherworldly visitors has begun to shift toward the mainstream. In 2022, the U.S. Department of Defense established the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, the latest governmental entity devoted to investigating unexplained sightings. Even the term of choice, “UFO,” has given way to “UAP”—unidentified aerial (or anomalous) phenomenon. And just this June, former U.S. Air Force officer and intelligence official David Grusch claimed that the U.S. government had retrieved remains of several aircraft of “non-human” origin. The fallout from Grusch’s claims is yet to be determined—as is their veracity—but it seems likely that, in the end, the world will settle back into the binary of believers and skeptics, with no concrete evidence to settle the debate. Regardless of which camp you fall into, some of us will always look skyward with hope; we may never be able to scour the entirety of the universe, but it’s hard not to thrill to Lucretius’ logic. In the meantime, the longform articles collected here offer a fascinating glimpse into the UFO community and the stories that have shaped our modern understanding of the topic.
For me, what makes alleged alien encounter testimony so compelling is that—regardless of whether I believe the person’s interpretation of events—the incident had an undeniable and profound effect on their lives. This may not be true in every case, but even if you write off many accounts as delusion or whimsy or simply fiction, you’re still left with a legion of people who have been dramatically changed by their perceived experiences. It’s comforting to know, then, that for those such as Jason Guillemette, a character in this piece about amateur ufologists, communities exist where one can share their experiences without judgment.
In Guillemette’s case, that community is the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON), a non-profit, volunteer-run organization active in more than 40 countries—and one whose members are as rigidly skeptical as Guillemette. For most MUFON alumni, this is a quest for truth, not validation; members work rigorously to find earthly explanations for reported sightings. And as Badelt widens his scope to other folks in other organizations, you can’t help but be moved by people’s stories. After all, if you were to have a life-changing close encounter, with whom would you share that knowledge?
Most of the time, he’s able to find an explanation, he says. He often sends videos to other volunteers at MUFON who specialize in analyzing computer images. He refers to websites that track the flight patterns of satellites and planes and the International Space Station—the usual suspects when it comes to UFO sightings, he says. Guillemette described a recent case in which a couple reported seeing strange lights hovering above a nearby lake. The lights circled above the lake and then dropped down into the water, only to rise up a moment later and zip away. It turned out to be a plane, he says—filling up with water to fight a nearby forest fire. “Not everybody likes what we come up with,” he says, “but sometimes it’s really evident.”
The history of UFO sightings in New Zealand dates back to the early 20th century. It seems such a tranquil and unassuming country—cinematic hobbit history notwithstanding—which perhaps makes the events recounted here even more unsettling. These are all-too-human tales of altered lives. Some cases, such as that of Iris Catt, a self-proclaimed alien abductee whose nightmarish encounters go back to her childhood, are heartbreakingly tragic. Others follow more positive narratives, believing that aliens are beaming down rays of positivity and openness, gradually bringing humanity to a point where it is ready for formal communication.
When I was at university in the 1990s, “regression therapy” became big news, with countless stories of trauma-blocked memories and past-life remembrances unearthed through hypnosis. Just as suddenly, regression therapy drowned in a flood of peer-reviewed criticism, relegated to yet another pseudoscience. The concept never went away entirely and it pops up again in Vaughan Yarwood’s story, cautiously approved by academic institutions for its utility in specific circumstances. It’s complex territory, but Yarwood navigates it with clarity and sensitivity.
Iris Catt, a mild-mannered, unprepossessing woman in her 40s, then introduces herself. She is an abductee. It appears certain aliens have had their eye on her from an early age. She recounts her night horrors calmly, the way people do who have learned to accept their scars, to make their hurt and anguish a part of themselves.
“It is happening every day, and it is happening in New Zealand,” says Iris. “It is not going to go away. I truly believe that more and more people are beginning to remember what is happening to them because the time is getting closer when we are going to have to recognise that we are not the only intelligent form of life in the universe.”
Her audience understands. She is among friends.
Harvard Medical School psychiatrist John Edward Mack spent many years engaging with people who claimed to have been abducted by extraterrestrials, in the process becoming a pioneer in his field. Not surprisingly, he attracted resistance from the scientific community—less because of his work than because, over time, he came to the startling and highly controversial conclusion that a number of alleged abductees were telling the truth. Mack’s research may be little remembered by his profession at large, but his warmth, humanity, and faith continue to inspire hope in a small community that gathers annually in Rhode Island. They prefer the term “experiencer” to “abductee,” and in this Vanity Fair feature Ralph Blumenthal interweaves their stories with Mack’s.
For more about one of the characters in Blumenthal’s story, a 1994 feature in Omni details Linda’s alleged experience.
Once again, for me, the fascination of this piece lies in the stories of these everyday folks. To some degree, it doesn’t matter what they actually experienced. What counts, as Mack understood, is they have experienced something, and that something left a profound mark on their lives. In seeking to apply rigor and structure to the stories he was collecting, Mack plowed a hard path with poise and compassion. As this piece eloquently shows, his work was not in vain.
“Nothing in my nearly 40 years of familiarity with psychiatry prepared me,” Mack later wrote in his 1994 best-seller, Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens. He had always assumed that anyone claiming to have been abducted by aliens was crazy, along with those who took them seriously. But here were people—students, homemakers, secretaries, writers, businesspeople, computer technicians, musicians, psychologists, a prison guard, an acupuncturist, a social worker, a gas-station attendant—reporting experiences that Mack could not begin to fathom, things, he reflected, that by all notions of reality “simply could not be.”
I have long been fascinated with the so-called Wow signal, received in 1977 by Ohio University’s Big Ear radio telescope, which was then being used to search for evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence. The tale of the signal makes for a great story in itself, but Keith Cooper’s piece sees that as merely a starting point. His narrative finds a central character in a man named Robert Gray: While the scientific community, including SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), gradually lowered the Wow signal to the status of “interesting curio,” Gray remained convinced that there was more to uncover.
Gray’s tenacity and belief in the face of mounting opposition is remarkable. Struggling for funding, unsuccessfully attempting to enlist help, and bartering for much-needed time on a limited number of radio telescopes, the frustrations he must have experienced make the twists in his story all the more poignant. Just when his enthusiasm began to wane, his work seemingly at a dead end, an exoplanet scientist reached out to Gray with a fresh idea, breathing new life into the man’s relentless quest. There is no neat, satisfying definitive end to this tale, but perhaps therein lies the true glory of Gray’s work. In the face of uncertainty, he carried on until the very end.
Nobody knows what the Wow signal was. We do know that it was not a regular astrophysical object, such as a galaxy or a pulsar. Curious the frequency that it was detected at, 1,420 MHz, is the frequency emitted by neutral hydrogen atoms in space, but it is also the frequency that scientists hunting for alien life listen to. Their reasoning is that aliens will supposedly know that astronomers will already be listening to that frequency in their studies of galactic hydrogen and so should easily detect their signal – or so the theory goes. Yet there was no message attached to the signal. It was just a burst of raw radio energy.
If SETI had a mythology, then the Wow signal would be its number one myth. And while it has never been forgotten by the public, the academic side of SETI has, by and large, dismissed it, quite possibly because it hasn’t been seen to repeat, and therefore cannot be verified—the golden rule of a successful SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) detection.
Celebrities who have copped to believing in UFOs are numerous enough to populate a listicle. Politicians? Not so much. Yet, the U.S. Congress’ House Oversight Committee has announced plans for a hearing regarding UAP reports, and if you trace the conversation back a few years, you’ll find that this shift is at least partly thanks to the protagonists in this story: former U.S. senator Harry Reid and Tom DeLonge, a founding member of pop-punk band Blink 182.
There’s a lot to digest here. It’s a wonderful example of hidden history: a small group of like-minded individuals working behind the scenes to advance their cause, with potentially wide-ranging repercussions. That history would be far less engaging, however, were it not for Tom DeLonge’s gregarious personality and indefatigable belief in alien visitors. His company, To The Stars, devotes considerable time and money to researching UAPs and extraterrestrial matters in general; Bryan Bender’s feature tells the story of how the singer managed to recruit experts and politicians to his cause.
Hanging on DeLonge’s wall was what might be considered the medals he’s collected in his struggle: a display case filled with dozens of commemorative coins from his meetings with generals, aerospace contractors and secret government agencies. They trace his visits to the CIA, to the U.S. Navy, to the “advanced development programs” division at Lockheed Martin’s famously secretive “Skunk Works” in Southern California, where some of the world’s most advanced spy planes were designed.
Chris Wheatley is a writer and journalist based in Oxford, U.K. He has too many guitars, too many records, and not enough cats.
Editor: Peter Rubin
Copy Editor: Krista Stevens
I’m back from a trip to both Fredericksburg, Virginia for Reclaim Open and after that Long Island, New York for some extended family time. All of that coming off several days in Lisbon, Portugal, so I was feeling the effects of being on the road for a bit. I have a lot to say about Reclaim Open, and that will begin here shortly, but before that I need to ease back onto the blog, so I’ll highlight some of my recent work in the bavacade.
Turns out the arcade work can also do double-duty as a kind of re-entry therapy. My bipolar gets pretty acute when I’m on the road and away from the family for a while. If I’m not mindful my thoughts can begin to spiral. So for this re-entry—before blogging or jumping headlong back into work—I took some time to tinker on a few games. I usually lug a bunch of arcade parts, repaired boards, chassis, etc. back from the US, and this trip was no different.* On top of the random parts, I also retrieved a few game boards I had shipped during my last trip to the US in February (including Sidam’s Condor, Exidy’s Cheyenne, and Nichibutsu’s Moon Cresta). On top of that, I took a few with me from Italy, namely a Moon Patrol bootleg board with sound issues, a Bagman with sprite issues, and my back-up Yie-Ar Kung-fu board. So, in short, a lot of boards to be looked at, and below is the tale of the tape for board repairs:
That’s a fair amount of board work, but as of now there are no bad boards,. This will be a short-lived victory, but I’ll take it.
Next up is monitor chassis repairs. I have two G07 cap kits (Robotron and Condor) I need to do, as well as a K4600 capkit for the Centuri Challenger. After that, the final project is the Hanterx Polo, which has been drawn out way too long, so I’m trying to resolve that sooner than later.
The other work happening has just been some random testing of parts and boards I brought back, such as testing a 15-pin Williams power brick for Make Trax: it works fine. I’ve also been testing boards like Condor (looks and sounds amazing) Bagman (working again and power adjustment fixed the power-induced sprite issue), Dig Dug (works perfectly), and Zach reported back Moon Cresta is all systems go. So Cheyenne, Moon Patrol, and Yie-Ar Kung-fu are the last boards to test, but two out of the three will need to wait until the games are back online. That leaves Moon Patrol, and I’ll be testing that here soon.
This weekend I fell down a repair rabbit hole. I picked up a degaussing coil in the US, and brought it back to add the final touch to Exidy’s Venture (one of my absolute favs) which had a bit of discoloration on the CRT. The degaussing fixed the issue, but soon after the game was freezing and eventually it seemed the monitor was cutting out. When I adjusted voltage the screen came back, but this time with mono-chromatic colors and it was out of sync. Major bummer. I started troubleshooting which lasted deep into Sunday to finally learn the monitor’s fine, but one of the chips that controls the color and sync (chip 13C) needed to have the solder re-flowed. I did that and re-seated everything and the game started working again and looking better than ever. That was a small, but rewarding, win.
It all becomes pretty consuming for me (which is true of most everything I do), but I find that focused attention and tinkering to solve small, elusive problems can be just what the doctor ordered when trying to return to a much needed work/life rhythm. Arcade therapy! But not so much playing the games these days as fixing them which is a really pleasurable, if unexpected, consequence of getting into this hobby.
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*I even found all my Dungeons & Dragons maps and guide books feared lost, but that is a post for another day.
Ecological crisis, rural deindustrialization, and real estate speculation have created conditions in which the far right thrives.
“If philosophy relies too heavily on rejection rates as a measure for journal quality or prestige, we run the risk of further degrading the quality of peer review.”
In the following post, Toby Handfield, Professor of Philosophy at Monash University, and Kevin Zollman, Professor of Philosophy and Social and Decision Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University, explain why they believe the common practice of using journal rejection rates as a proxy for journal quality is bad.
This is the second in a series of weekly guest posts by different authors at Daily Nous this summer.
[Mel Bochner, “Counting Alternatives: The Wittgenstein Illustrations” (selections)]
Ask any philosopher about the state of publishing in academic philosophy and they will complain. Near the top of the list will be the quality of reviews (they’re poor) and rejection rates (they’re high). Indeed, philosophy does have extremely high rejection rates relative to other fields. It’s extremely hard to understand why we have such high rejection rates. Perhaps there is simply more low-quality work in philosophy than other fields. Or, perhaps, rejection rates are themselves something that philosophy journals strive to maintain. Many journals strive to publish only the very best work within their purview, and perhaps they use their rejection rates to show themselves that they are succeeding.
Like many fields, philosophy also has an implicit hierarchy of journals. Of course, people disagree at the margins, but there seems to be widespread agreement among anglophone philosophers (at least) about what counts as a top 5 or top 10 journal. Looking at some (noisy) data about rejection rates, it does appear that the most highly regarded journals have high rejection rates. So, while we complain about rejection rates, we also seem to—directly or indirectly—reward journals that reject often.
It is quite natural to use rejection rates as a kind of proxy for the quality of the journal, especially in a field like philosophy where other qualitative and quantitative measures of quality are somewhat unreliable. We think it is quite common for philosophers to use the rejection rates of journals as a proxy for paper quality when thinking about hiring, promotion, and tenure. It’s impressive when a graduate student has published in The Philosophical Review, in large part because The Philosophical Review rejects so many papers. Rejection rates featured prominently—among many other things—in the recent controversy surrounding the Journal of Political Philosophy.
We, along with co-author Julian García, argue that this might be a dangerous mistake. (This paper is forthcoming in Philosophy of Science—a journal that, we feel obligated to point out, has a high rejection rate.) Our basic argument is that as journals become implicitly or explicitly judged by their rejection rates, the quality of peer review will go down, thus making journals worse. We do so by using a formal model, but the basic idea is not hard to understand.
We start by asking a very basic question: what is it that a journal is striving to achieve? We consider two alternatives: (1) that the journal is trying to maximize the average quality of its published papers or (2) that the journal is trying to maximize its rejection rate. The journal must decide both what threshold counts as good enough for their journal and also how much effort to invest in peer review. They can always make peer review better, but it comes at a cost (something that is all too familiar).
This already shows why judging journals by rejection rates can potentially be quite harmful. If a journal is merely striving to maximize its rejection rate, it doesn’t much care who it rejects. So, it has less incentive to invest in high quality peer review than does a journal that is judged by the average quality of papers in the journal. After all, if a journal only cares about rejection rates, it doesn’t much matter if a rejected paper was good or bad.
This already is probably sufficient to give one pause, but it actually gets much worse. In that quick argument, we implicitly assumed that there was a fixed population of authors who mindlessly submitted to the journal, hoping to get lucky. However, in the real world, authors might be aware of their chance of acceptance and choose not to submit if they regard the effort as not worth the cost.
A journal editor who wants to maintain a high rejection rate now has a problem. If they are too selective, authors of bad papers might opt not to submit, and a paper that isn’t submitted can’t be rejected. If a journal very predictably rejects papers below a given standard, their rejection rates will go down because authors of less good papers will know they don’t stand a chance of being accepted. A journal editor who cares about their journal’s rejection rate will then be motivated to tolerate more error in its peer review process in order to give authors a fighting chance to be accepted. They use their unreliable peer review as a carrot to encourage authors to submit, which in turn allows the journal to keep their rejection rates high.
We consider several variations on our model to demonstrate how this result is robust to different ways that authors might be incentivized to publish in different journals. We would encourage the interested reader to look at the details in the paper.
Of course, our method is to use simplified models, and in doing so we run the risk that a simplification might be driving the results. Most concerning, in our mind, is that our model features a world with only one journal. Philosophy has multiple journals, although in some fields of philosophy a single journal might dominate the area as the premier outlet for work in that area. Future work would need to determine if this is a critical assumption, although our guess is that it is not.
Although we don’t investigate this in our paper, we think that the process we identify might also exist in other selection processes like college and graduate school admission or hiring. In the US, colleges often advertise the selectivity of their admissions process, and we suspect that they face the same perverse incentives we identify.
Whether you share our intuition about this or not, we think the process we identify is concerning. If philosophy relies too heavily on rejection rates as a measure for journal quality or prestige, we run the risk of further degrading the quality of peer review. We think it is potentially problematic that journals sometimes advertise their rejection rates, lest it contribute to rejection rates being a sought after mark of prestige. Furthermore, we think it’s important that philosophy as a discipline walk back its use of rejection rates as a proxy for journal quality. To the extent that we are doing that now, it may actually serve to undermine the very thing we are hoping to achieve.
The post Rejection Rates Should Not Be a Measure of Journal Quality (guest post) first appeared on Daily Nous.
Enlarge / A person sits at the slot machines at a casino. (credit: Getty | Octavio Jones)
A Tacoma, Washington, woman who has refused court-ordered tuberculosis treatment for over a year is evading arrest and has reportedly taken public transit to go to a casino while on the lam.
The Tacoma-Pierce County Health Department has been trying to get the woman to comply with treatment since at least January 2022, when she received her first court order. Since then, she has received over a dozen court orders for treatment and isolation amid monthly court hearings and order renewals. Last month, Pierce County Superior Court Judge Philip Sorensen finally found her in contempt and issued a warrant for her arrest and involuntary detention at the county jail for treatment and isolation.
"In each case like this, we are constantly balancing risk to the public and the civil liberties of the patient," the health department wrote in a blog post days before the arrest warrant was issued. "We are always hopeful a patient will choose to comply voluntarily. Seeking to enforce a court order through a civil arrest warrant is always our last resort."
I’ve been pretty busy knocking out my to-do list for the bavacade. I created a long one after returning from the US, and I’ve gotten through most of it, so might be a good time to create a log with work done over the past month or so.
Back of pac-man painted
Pac-man Multi-game HSS Kit
High Score Save Kit for Venture
Cheyenne original ROMs
Big Blue Capacitor (Atari Power Brick)
12V Power Switch for LED Marquee Light in Dig Dug
Still to do:
Fred Fletcher-Jackson, a Wheel of Fortune contestant, recently won an impressive $75,800 in a "perfect game" on the game show. As he celebrated his victory, host Pat Sajak playfully "tackled" him from behind and put his arm in a "chicken wing" move. — Read the rest
Since marginalized communities tend to suffer disproportionately when governments make contemptible policy choices, it stands to reason that those communities might develop a heightened sensitivity about the merits of new policies. At the very least they have reason to cultivate a perspective and preferences that differ from people with resources (money, power, societal standing) to buffer them from the consequences of poor policy stewardship.
That perspective has a kernel of wise counsel.
There’s an abundance of evidence that policies ranging from de-industrialization since the 1970s to the “drug war” of the 1980s and 1990s to the pandemic response today dramatically harmed Black communities more than white or affluent ones. Same goes for the distribution of pain that comes with structural poverty and economic recessions.
But I’m thinking about foreign policy. Specifically, I have a hunch that Black Americans have a comparatively good bullshit detector about statecraft.
Why? Not because of anything innate or “biological,” but because of their historical experience in the United States and their overrepresentation in structural (and literal) violence as a consequence of US policy choices. Greater personal stakes means greater attentiveness to costs and risks, and therefore better judgment.
The caveat is that African Americans are far from monolithic, and that sometimes extends to how they view US foreign policy. The US decision to enter World War I was exceedingly controversial and regrettable, but even prominent Black intellectuals of the time saw the war as a chance to secure their place in American society by supporting it.
Black opinion about World War II—a war that offered some social mobility for African Americans—was more uniformly favorable. Even though it was a war of empire against empire, it was not only that, and the greater evil was clear enough to most.
In Vietnam, Black opinion was almost entirely critical of the war. Not only because Black Americans were being disproportionately drafted, court-martialed, and subsequently killed. And not only because, as Martin Luther King, Jr. decried, Congress used the cost of the Vietnam War as an excuse to cut anti-poverty programs that helped Black America.
But also because their quarrel was not with those seeking freedom abroad (the Vietnamese) but rather those denying their freedom at home (the Cold Warriors). As Muhammad Ali said in refusing to be drafted:
My enemy is the white people, not the Viet Cong or Chinese or Japanese. You’re my opposer when I want freedom. You’re my opposer when I want justice. You’re my opposer when I want equality.
And of course, Black Americans were mostly opposed to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, even though, perversely, that war and the larger War on Terror construct gave Black Americans the chance at societal inclusion, so long as they became patriotic “terror warriors.” I was active duty Air Force during the early War on Terror years, and the only sustained critiques I was exposed to came from hip-hop.
So at the risk of oversimplifying, the Black community would have counseled in favor of World War II, against Vietnam, and against both Iraq and the War on Terror. Sounds like good judgment to me.
And yet the idea that the public—in whole or in part—is fit to judge foreign policy is alien to Washington.
By tradition, foreign policy is both an elite and elitist activity. The business of national security and diplomacy involves short reaction times, state secrets, bourgeoise social networks, and growing planetary complexity—all of which lends itself to elitism and technocracy. Foreign policy practitioners have long since taken a Lippmann-esque turn away from any conception of participatory democracy in foreign policy in favor an elite stewardship model that disavows the existence of a public mind or public will.
When I worked as a foreign policy practitioner, I recall having a haughty, dismissive attitude toward the public—much like my peers and superiors. I’ve since struggled with the problematic of how to do foreign policy in a way that makes it more participatory beyond just greater diversity in the diplomatic corps.
As the United States retools its economy and military to combat Russia, contain China, and prolong US global primacy, we find ourselves in another moment when US foreign policy is structuring the reality that the rest of us have to live within. One of several aspects that troubles me about all this “great-power competition” stuff is that it has proceeded entirely as a Washington-elite project. It has not answered to the public—to say nothing of the Black community—in any meaningful way.
In that context, I recorded an episode of my podcast with Christopher Shell at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. It was a wide-ranging discussion anchored in survey results of Black Americans’ views of the military, Ukraine policy, Taiwan, and US interventionism abroad. His findings told an interesting story that reveals gaps between Black American opinion and the overall thrust of US policy.
Black Americans have an overwhelmingly favorable view of the US military, but:
There’s much more than that in the data, and class position affects a lot of these views—the least economically secure tend to be opposed to war, which should not be surprising given what wars usually mean for those who are already hard up or oppressed.
Policy practitioners should be keenly attentive to what Black Americans think generally. It’s not just a matter of fidelity to an ideal of participatory democracy; there could be strategic merit to centering their perspective in the conduct of policies ostensibly done in their name. It might be a way of avoiding more Vietnams and Iraqs, or worse.
This is cross-posted at Van’s newsletter.
John Lewis-Stempel visits Ashdown Forest in Sussex, England, to closely observe a 300-year-old oak tree (Quercus robur). From first light until midnight, Lewis-Stempel describes the animals, birds, insects, and flora that depend on it in careful detail. In addition to astonishing you with the sheer variety and volume of creatures that inhabit and visit the tree, this piece will gently slow your heartbeat. You’ll feel your shoulders loosen as you follow Lewis-Stempel’s keen observations. It’s exactly the type of relaxation meditation we can all use.
7.01 am
The leaves of autumn, brought down by the screaming Halloween wind, still lie around the tree in a thick sodden copper mat; the mould is soft on the pads of the returning vixen as she slinks down into her den among the tree’s roots, a rabbit clamped in her jaws from her night prowl. A present for her cubs.
5.16 pm
The ecology of the oak tree is a game of consequences: the newly emerged leaves of the oak are eaten by the pale-green caterpillar of the wintermoth, which, in turn, feeds the blue tit, whose brood has just hatched in yet another of the tree’s cavities; the sparrowhawk, terror of the copse, flashes between the tangled branches, to catch and feed on the blue tit.
Twenty year recollections of the 2003 invasion of Iraq are popping up. Some are debating whether there were any positive outcomes from the war, others reflecting on what it meant for those who fought (on the US side) or suffered (on the Iraqi side). The Iraq war has played a big role in my career, but I wanted to talk about what it means for the liberal internationalist orientation to the world.
In the first lecture of my classes, I tell my students that the 9/11 attacks were my second week of college, and discuss what a big impact they had on my choice of career and research area. That’s true, but I really should talk about the Iraq war as well.
As the build up to the war began, my classmates and I at my isolated lefty college were shocked. How could anyone want to start a second war after just invading Afghanistan? How could anyone think Iraq had anything to do with 9/11? How could anyone believe this was a good idea?
I soon realized it didn’t matter what I thought. Conservative friends and family members were swept up in post-9/11 patriotism/panic.
Some have argued that neoconservative adventures like the Iraq war are the end result of liberal internationalism, and it should be abandoned
And then, during spring break, the war began. I watched in shock as the United States unleashed its might on Iraq. I was torn. I wasn’t one of those lefties who defended Saddam Hussein (we had some at my college). I wanted him gone. But even at 20 I knew this wasn’t the way to do it.
I continued with my plan to work in the US intelligence community while also pursuing scholarly studies. I got an internship with a defense contractor, was assigned to an intelligence agency. A few years into my career, I got accepted to a PhD program, was offered a promotion at my firm, and was offered a permanent job with the government agency. I went the PhD route (whether or not that was the right choice is the topic for another post).
I said this post wasn’t going to me about me, and I meant it. I gave this background to explain how I became involved in the bigger debate about the Iraq war: whether it invalidated liberal internationalism. While I was working in DC I also became part of a foreign policy group, the Truman National Security Project, meant to revive muscular liberal internationalism within the Democratic Party. I left after a few years, but the debates we had there stuck with me.
Liberal internationalism is a specific orientation towards the world. Advocates believe there is an international order that can be mutually beneficial. States should resolve disputes peacefully and multilaterally, through the United Nations and other international organizations. Human rights should trump narrow security interests. And states’ foreign policy should focus on upholding this international order.
Historically it had been tied to the US Democratic Party. This changed with the Bush Administration. A group of thinkers within the Republican party–growing out of the Reagan Administration’s aggressive anti-Soviet policies–sought to ensure US primacy while also defending democracy and human rights. They saw the response to 9/11 as a way to advance these goals, as signified in the 2002 National Security Strategy. Bush drew on similar language when justifying the Iraq War.
The Bush Administration’s use of liberal internationalist arguments to justify the Iraq War did trap some liberal internationalists. For example, the prominent liberal thinker Michael Ignatieff supported the Iraq War. This has given rise to the pejorative “liberal hawk” moniker-the claim that liberal internationalists are basically war-mongers. We’ve seen this deployed against Democratic figures like Hillary Clinton from both the left and the right.
As a result, some have argued that neoconservative adventures like the Iraq war are the end result of liberal internationalism, and it should be abandoned. To these policy thinkers, liberal internationalism is an “increasingly unsustainable grand strategy.” Others have gone further to question the validity or even the existence of a liberal international order, which liberal internationalism is meant to sustain.
But liberal internationalism is not dead.
First, Americans do not support an isolationist or restrained foreign policy. A 2019 report from the Center for American Progress found that US voters are “weary” of military interventions, but have not rejected American leadership in the world.
The irony is that many calling for restraint in US foreign policy for the sake of the world are as US-centric as liberal hawks.
Second, there is more to liberal internationalism than military interventions. This is what restrainers tend to suggest-that, since liberal internationalists tend to just be hawks a liberal internationalist grand strategy will lead to another Iraq war. And, to be fair, the liberal side isn’t helped when prominent members like Anne-Marie Slaughter praised Trump’s poorly-thought out air strikes on Syria. But there is a lot more to liberal internationalism- multilateralism, respect for human rights, upholding international institutions.
More importantly, those who assume the Iraq war damned liberal internationalism seem to ignore its relevance outside the United States. Many countries around the world look to the UN to reflect their views and advance their interests. This is why Trump’s decision to pull out of the UN Human Rights Council was concerning: other states take this, and other UN bodies, very seriously. The rest of the world–especially the Global South–has an interest in a robust UN, which only a liberal internationalist grand strategy can ensure.
Additionally, many countries depend on the liberal international order for support. The UN, while far from perfect, performs services no state can legitimately do on its own, such as supporting economic development, protecting cultural sites, and keeping the peace between combatants. Persistent security threat–like that of ISIS and other militant groups in the Sahel–require the international community’s assistance.
The irony, then, is that many calling for restraint in US foreign policy for the sake of the world are as US-centric as liberal hawks. They approach the relevance of liberal internationalism only in terms of whether America will invade another Middle Eastern country.
It gets a little tiresome when debate over US international action boils down to “but the Iraq war was bad.” Reducing the debate to pro/con military intervention makes it hard to effectively respond to crises, as arguably occurred in the Obama Administration’s response (or lack thereof) to the Syrian civil war. It also leads to poor analysis, such as when Middle East experts, viewing everything through the lens of another Iraq war, assumed that Saudi Arabia would pull America into a war with Iran.
But liberal internationalists are also at fault. They’re attached to US primacy, from Madeleine Albright’s invocation of America as the “indispensable nation” to Joe Biden’s foreign policy promise to “place America at the head of the table.” They seem obsessed with looking tough–which I suspect is behind the cheerleading of air strikes. They haven’t figured out a way to support human rights and a robust US international presence while also criticizing the Iraq War.
And that is the issue. Liberal internationalism is still viable, and much of the world depends on America’s continued support of this grand strategy. But US foreign policy debates revolve around that horrific and illegal invasion of March 20th, 2003, rather than the full set of policies we could adopt.
UPDATE: Edited to fix a typo
As a gay reader (and gay writer, myself), I take special notice when I come across a deal announcement for a queer novel written by an openly queer person. There are few enough of these books that I often find myself reading books destinated to disappoint me—young adult coming out stories, romantic comedies, women in their twenties and thirties having their first queer experience while already married to a man. These books are all valuable, and are often quite good, but I’m not their best reader. I want the uncomfortable nuances of queer life we don’t often find in queer media—even media created by queer people—thanks at least in part to the parameters set by cisgender, heterosexual people. I want, as I eventually realized, exactly what Richard Mirabella delivers in his stunning debut, Brother & Sister Enter the Forest.
Mirabella, a civil servant in his forties who lives in upstate New York, is a brave writer. Adult literary debuts are no stranger to the “ambitious” descriptor, but Mirabella’s novel is quiet. His prose—which could be described as plain or simple by someone who doesn’t understand its power—is controlled. Mirabella’s sentences ache in their simplicity.
Why does this stylistic choice work so well? Mirabella’s novel could easily be high drama. We have a dual timeline story of siblings—Justin and Willa—whose adolescence in a quiet, wintery town is permanently marred by violence committed by Nick, Justin’s older boyfriend. Readers watch this origin story unfold juxtaposed against the siblings decades later as they try to navigate their relationship as well as new ones. Willa, a nurse, creates dioramas. Justin lives with addiction as best he can. Does the violence that haunts this family change it forever?
That’s not the question this text answers. It’s too simple. Mirabella delicately portrays the after effects of trauma, and one of those traumas is a disturbing act of violence that defines the plot. But Mirabella also goes to that brave place: He shows readers the trauma of a mother who is quiet, even patient, in her homophobia. Of classroom bullies who are still around today. Of building a chosen family that disappoints. Of remembering—and not.
I was lucky enough to chat on the phone with Mirabella about these themes and his craft. We spent a good hour talking about depictions of dating violence in queer media (and how our community responds to it), healing from homophobia experienced both inside and outside of the home, and how it feels to wrestle with these hurts while Republicans wage war against queer people from a new angle—one where the sort of relationship Mirabella writes could be misconstrued as evidence that all queer people are predatory monsters.
***
The Rumpus: Would you like to start us off by sharing what you think your book is about?
Richard Mirabella: I would say my novel is about siblings; in this case, Willa and Justin, and their relationship in youth and adulthood. That relationship has been affected by violence that the brother, Justin, experienced as a teenager. I also think it’s about the failure of a family to care for their queer child whose pain is inconvenient to them.
Rumpus: We have chosen families in this book who both heal and disappoint us.
Mirabella: Yeah, I’m actually glad you said disappointing. Nothing in life is perfect and Justin has found kind of a lovely little family but . . .
Rumpus: But?
Mirabella: I’m gonna slow down a little bit and just say: I wanted to give them to him. It’s kind of a gift. [But] they’re not magical. They’re just people. There are lovely moments between all of them where they’re trying but failing.
Rumpus: Do you think straight people and queer people will have different reactions to these failures?
Mirabella: It really depends on the person. Justin’s gonna sink all of them—he’s taking them all down with him. Justin is a victim of heterosexist, homophobic abuse. The violence that happens to him is a direct reaction to that. He is failed by his chosen family too. I don’t know if straight people will get that. I want people to read it and get whatever they get from it, but I think queer people will immediately see and understand it.
Rumpus: Why do you think it works so well to have Nick [Justin’s older boyfriend] missing in the adult narrative?
Mirabella: I started writing this book and I thought, I’m gonna write like a Shirley Jackson novel. You know, the sort of literary novel that is haunted or has something unreal or supernatural about it. There were elements that I cut from it. But I think Nick is still a ghost and haunts the novel in a lot of ways. Maybe being haunted is just feeling something crooked nearby. In this book, that’s Nick. Justin doesn’t know what happened or where he is. To me, that’s so interesting, to have this spirit hovering over you.
Rumpus: Can you say more about your idea of it being a haunted literary novel?
Mirabella: I’m really fascinated by strange fiction, weird fiction. This novel was inspired by a Grimm’s fairytale, called “Brother and Sister” or “Little Brother and Little Sister,” where the brother is transformed into a fawn. And the sister vows to care for him.
It made me think a little bit about being transformed by something that happens to you, something that changes you in a way that is disruptive to you. Perhaps destructive even to other people in your life.
I think there are a few hauntings in this book. Nick is haunting Justin. Justin’s experiences of violence are haunting him. The feelings of fear. I think Willa is haunted by Justin in different ways—not knowing what to do or how to care for him. I think Justin is haunted by men in general. At one of my favorite moments in the book, Justin has this sort of surreal encounter in the middle of the night. That was a surprise when I wrote it, and it made me realize how haunted Justin is just by manhood.
Rumpus: Do you feel like men in this book are haunted by toxic masculinity?
Mirabella: I have to say yes because, I mean, we all are. We’re swimming in the ocean of patriarchy at all times. So yeah, absolutely.
Rumpus: Can you talk to me a little bit about your process of deciding to have dual timelines for adolescence and adulthood? Were you always hoping to use this method to show the aftermath of trauma?
Mirabella: That’s always what I wanted this book to be about, but I just didn’t know how it would play out. At first it was linear and then it sort of shattered and broke apart a little bit more. I wanted to write about a brother and sister, and so I started writing about them dealing with something in adulthood, but I wasn’t sure of what.
I’m really interested in what happens after something bad. So yeah, it was important for me to show the far reaching effects of trauma and of violence in people’s lives. I think it’s less interesting to me to just focus on one person. So I started writing about Willa and Justin coming back into her life. It kind of grew out of going back to their childhood to work towards whatever it was that happened to them.
Rumpus: What went into your decision to have this specific age gap in this book? Did their ages or the degree of the age gap ever change while writing?
Mirabella: My drafts are all hugely different from each other. So in earlier drafts, Nick was a side character associated with an older person that both Nick and Justin were sort of in a relationship with—like a friendship and a sexual relationship. And I just realized the other person wasn’t very interesting.
I liked Nick more. I thought Nick was more interesting, and I also thought he was frightening, a little bit. In then the next draft he became the focus rather than this other character, who eventually just went away.
Rumpus: Why do you think it’s valuable or interesting to write a character that’s a little scary to the writer?
Mirabella: It’s more interesting to write about that. Nick represents something that I’ve always struggled with, which is masculinity. You know, he’s toxic. And you know, he’s a gay person. He won’t accept that about himself. When I think about him I think of somebody who cannot accept himself. He also criticizes what he sees as signals of Justin’s queerness; the way he holds himself, the music he chooses when they go to the CD store. He’s always telling Justin: The world’s gonna eat you up, basically.
I’ve tried writing Nick for a long time. The muscle dude I would have avoided in my youth, who may have approached me in my youth, and who I was attracted to, but terrified of. I think my early fear of men comes out in writing Nick.
Rumpus: When I think about Justin’s teenage years, I think about him being bullied by his peers, and I think about him on the internet. A lot of readers today will relate to both the bullying and going online—including meeting people online—as the escape. What made you include the internet in this way? Do you feel the presence of the internet establishes readers in a very contemporary sort of narrative?
Mirabella: You know, the internet was pretty new when I when I was a teenager. But at this point, in the book? It’s not much later on. And I was thinking about how even if at that point I knew someone else was gay in my high school, we couldn’t speak to each other about it. That would have been dangerous.
I haven’t been in high school in an extremely long time, so I don’t know what it’s like now. I feel it’s probably a lot more open. But I wanted to include a situation where Justin had seen Nick in school, knew who he was, but they never spoke to each other. What created the opportunity for them to speak to each other was the internet. Here was this website where Justin could see: Oh, this person is gay. I didn’t know that! And could reach out to him.
Rumpus: That’s so interesting. It feels notable to me that while there isn’t a significant age difference between Justin and Nick, their lives feel so different because Nick is out of high school.
Mirabella: Nick has the freedom that Justin doesn’t yet possess. Nick sort of gives Justin a hard time about that too: Oh, why do you have to listen to your mother? They’re only a couple of years apart in age and I like the idea that Nick has a freedom that Justin doesn’t.
Rumpus: Do you feel the story would be very different if Justin and Nick had met when they were the same age? Or if their age difference was larger, as tends to be how age gap couples are portrayed in media?
Mirabella: In an earlier draft, Nick was older. What worried me was that the book would become about that topic; a young queer person being [in a relationship with] an older queer person. But the book is not really about that.
I have to say, I struggled with that for a little while. Honestly, when I started writing more about Nick, I liked his sort of youthful toughness. Justin is kind of a punk kid, but he’s also very soft.
Rumpus: Justin faces violence and harm from a number of people in this book, including, eventually, Nick. What went into the decision to have Justin’s partner be the one to ultimately hurt him, versus, say, a stranger or even a hate crime?
Mirabella: It’s very bleak, isn’t it? I think because it broke my heart, I had to write it. It wasn’t an intellectual choice. It was more about somebody feeling like they could trust a person and then slowly realizing they actually don’t have what they thought they had. They don’t have protection.
Maybe it’s trying to say we have ourselves and we have to find strength in ourselves. We have to do the best we can to love ourselves. I think, in youth, especially at Justin’s age—sixteen, seventeen—it’s very hard to feel that self-love. I think especially as a queer teen, it was hard for me to find that love inside for myself. I absolutely was looking for it outside.
Rumpus: Did you ever have concerns that queer people would read the depictions of same-sex abuse and violence in this book and see it as hurting the “cause” or ruin some sanitized version of queer people?
Mirabella: I lost sleep over that honestly. I think what’s important to me as a writer is to tell the truth about the world as best as I can. And that includes allowing queer people to be imperfect, like all other human beings. You know, writing shining examples of queerness is not gonna change the minds of people who already hate us. I think the realities of our lives don’t matter at all to those people who want to erase and criminalize us.
As far as other queer people, I understand that some queer people may be angry if they read something like this, about a queer person enacting violence on another queer person. But that just goes back to what I said. It’s a reality of our world. And I think there are other more nurturing relationships in the novel. So I think it shows a spectrum, but it is a worry of mine, of course.
Rumpus: Justin and Willa’s mother Grace embodies a sort of quiet homophobia we don’t often see portrayed in media. Do you think some readers, who might see themselves as accepting or even as allies, might recognize themselves in Grace? Like “Oh, I’m not actually as supportive or understanding as I thought I was?”
Mirabella: You know, I didn’t set out to write this novel with that in mind, but while I was writing the novel, I read the book Ties That Bind: Familial Homophobia and its Consequences by Sarah Schulman. It affected me so deeply (as does most of her work) and it really helped me shape the novel in a lot of ways.
In retrospect, I would hope somebody who perhaps has a queer child and doesn’t necessarily know how to handle that would read this and see the character of Grace—who I think is just unsure about Justin, she doesn’t understand him, doesn’t know what to do with him—and understand that perhaps if she showed some understanding, things would have gone differently for him.
Grace feels she has to do something, where [instead] she could just love and accept him. His troubles in his teen years were brought on by a society that doesn’t accept who Justin is, even though he accepts himself.
Rumpus: Grace fails Justin (and Willa) both when they’re adolescents and when they’re adults, though in different ways. Do you feel that if she was a more accepting or more nurturing parent, the whole plot of the book would be different?
Mirabella: To be honest, no, because it’s not just Grace. It’s the world. I hate to be so black and white about it, but . . . Obviously Grace is homophobic. But I don’t think she is nakedly homophobic. I think it’s a matter of ignorance on her part. What Justin faces in life, and even in school is a lot more intense and naked on the surface. And I think that is a catalyst for what happens later in the novel. I think even aside from Grace, he would be on that path.
Rumpus: We know book bans and censorship are bad. Why do you think it’s important that all young people have access to books by and about queer people?
Mirabella: We’re part of humanity, number one. I think it’s important, not just for queer children to read about themselves, but for other children to read about the spectrum of experience. It’s a part of life. And we want children to understand the world. That’s why they’re in school.
Rumpus: What do you think about the ongoing Republican rallying cries trying to paint queer people as predatory, manipulative, or somehow inherently obscene or inappropriate?
Mirabella: Republicans are always talking about personal freedom. And yet. You know, if they really believed in that freedom, they would allow people’s families to make these decisions. If a family is like, No, I don’t want you to read this, you’re too young, then that’s that family. They can do that (and I believe they’re stifling their children).
I grew up in a house where [the thinking was], You want to read this? Okay, go ahead, read it and we’ll talk about it. Parents don’t want to talk to their children, they’re uncomfortable talking to their children about the realities of the world. They wanna ban books so that other people can’t read them. It’s infuriating. I think a lot of it is that they have a particular vision of the world—which I think is largely white cis and hetero—and so anything that doesn’t fit into that mold is dangerous. Period.
***
Author photo by Danielle Stephens
Doors are at 6pm; drinks & small plates are available to purchase. Club Fugazi will remain open and serving drinks after the talk, for further conversation. You can also tune in to the livestream on this page and our YouTube channel.
How can we turn the tide on species loss and help biodiversity and bioabundance flourish for millennia to come?
Ryan Phelan is Executive Director of Revive & Restore; the leading wildlife conservation organization promoting the incorporation of biotechnologies into standard conservation practice. Phelan will share the new Genetic Rescue Toolkit for conservation – a suite of biotechnology tools and conservation applications that offer hope and a path to recovery for threatened species. In this talk, Phelan will present examples of the toolkit in action, including corals that better withstand rising ocean temperatures, trees that withstand a fungal blight, and the genetic rescue of the black-footed ferret, once thought to be extinct.
Revive & Restore brings biotechnologies to conservation in responsible ways; from engaging local communities where ecological restorations are underway, to connecting stakeholders in disciplines like biotech, bioethics, conservation organizations and government agencies. Together, they are forging new paths to bioabundance in our changing world.
Ryan Phelan will be joined by forecaster and Long Now Board Member Paul Saffo for the Q&A to discuss long-term outcomes and the Intended Consequences framing used by Revive & Restore.
Looking for vicuña is not for the faint of heart, or for those who suffer from car or altitude sickness. After two hours of bouncing along rough dirt roads in an all-wheel drive pickup, I finally spotted a vicuña drinking from a pond at about 17,000 feet above sea level. Then I saw another, and another. Once I knew how to look, the hillside was suddenly spotted with vicuña. Their pale cinnamon backs and white bellies blended in perfectly with the harsh rocky landscape.
The vicuña is the baby-faced, shy cousin of the llama. Their eyes are almost comically large in their delicate faces, with long eyelashes. They are famously shy and run like the wind from any perceived threat. They also have some of the softest fur in the world. That fur earned them a prominent place among the Inca’s pantheon of sacred animals. It’s also what also makes them so valuable today.
The finest natural fiber, vicuña fur is a mere nine to twelve microns in diameter. For comparison, cashmere ranges from fourteen to nineteen microns. Each delicate strand is hollow, making it incredibly lightweight and insulating.
Vicuña fur is also difficult to find. Very few companies make garments with vicuña, and they sell to a select few stores. Though the fur comes from Peru, most of what you’ll find in a shop is made in Italy. Only one brand, Kuna, sells products made in Peru. Regardless of where it’s made, a simple scarf costs $1,000 to $3,000 USD, and a full shawl can cost upwards of $10,000 USD. Each garment is sold with a certificate, showing that the fur was harvested ethically in government regulated shearings of wild vicuñas.
Vicuña fur was exceptionally valuable long before Italian manufacturing. The Inca, who ruled much of South America in the 01400s and 01500s, decreed that only the royal family could wear vicuña fur. Vicuñas were both sacred and protected: hunting one was punishable by death. Despite the Inca’s attachment to the vicuña, they were never domesticated. Thousands of years ago, humans domesticated llamas and alpacas, but the vicuña stayed wild.
During Incan times, the protection afforded the vicuña helped it thrive. When the Spanish arrived in South America, they estimated that about 2 million lived throughout the Andes. That is when the indiscriminate killing of vicuñas began, which decimated the population.
When the Inca lost control of South America, the vicuña lost its protection. In the late 01500s, hunting vicuña went from being a capital crime to being encouraged by the Spanish crown. Change started in 01777, when the Spanish Imperial Court decreed it was illegal to kill a vicuña. Simón Bolívar enacted a similar law in 01825. Neither effort had much effect, and poaching continued. In the 01960s, about 2,000 vicuña remained in Peru, and only 6,000 in all of South America.
In 01969, Peru and Bolivia signed an accord in La Paz that began a new era of protection for the vicuña. Chile and Ecuador joined soon after, followed by Argentina in 01971. After 01969, the population quickly began to recover. A census conducted by Peru’s Ministry of Agriculture in 02012 revealed over 200,000 vicuña in Peru. Convenio de la Vicuña found over 470,000 in all of South America in 02016.
Why were conservation efforts in the 01970s successful when similar laws had failed for the previous 200 years? One likely explanation is who controlled the lands where the vicuña live. Land grants from the Spanish crown to colonizers in the 01600s took control of the lands away from Indigenous Andeans. Even after independence, Peru’s rural areas suffered under a feudal system where Indigenous peoples worked as unpaid serfs, in conditions akin to modern slavery. It wasn’t until the Agrarian Reform in 01969 that Indigenous communities started to regain control of their lands. Ownership of large tracts of land passed from the descendants of Spanish colonizers to the Indigenous communities who live on them.
Today, most land in Peru’s puna, the high altitude plateau that covers much of southern Peru, is communally owned by rural Indigenous communities, though some is privately owned. According to Santiago Paredes, director of Pampas Galeras National Reserve, regardless of who owns the land, all vicuña must be protected. Any community, person or company that owns vicuña habitat must register a management plan with SERFOR, Peru’s National Forest and Wildlife Service. The plans include specific ways that vicuña will be protected from poaching, as well as how their habitat will be conserved and, if possible, improved.
Even with the population rebounding, vicuñas are still at risk. The biggest threats to their survival are loss of habitat due to climate change, competition for grazing with domestic animals, diseases like mange, and poaching.
Climate models predict decreasing rainfall in the central and southern mountain ranges in Peru, which is precisely where vicuñas live. According to USAID’s Climate Risk Profile for Peru, “temperature increases are forcing lower-elevation ecosystems to move higher, encroaching upon endemic species and ecosystems and increasing risk of extinction of high-mountain species.” As climate change pushes vicuña higher up the peaks, their habitat shrinks and fragments.
It is legal to graze livestock on vicuña habitat, which decreases their food supply. Contact with domesticated animals and rising temperatures may be causing the increasing mange outbreak among vicuña. While more research is needed, a 02021 study in Peru found that 6.1% of vicuña surveyed were infected. The parasite not only saps the animal’s energy, it destroys their fur, which makes them vulnerable to the extreme cold of the Andes. Mange is now the leading cause of death in vicuñas.
Some of these threats are easier to manage than others. In 02022, Peru’s National Agrarian Health Service (SENASA) began treating vicuña for mange in eleven regions. Enforcement of anti-poaching laws is improving. The nebulous threat of climate change is much harder to combat. Communities now focus on protecting the vicuña’s habitat, hoping that their efforts to improve the vicuña’s food and water supply will compensate for the damages of climate change.
The most important aspects of vicuña habitat are a constant source of water, native grasses for grazing, and an absence of human development. Unlike most camelids, vicuña must drink water every day. They are territorial animals and live in small herds with one alpha male and up to ten females with their offspring. During the day, they spread out in grassy meadows to graze. At night, they climb up rocky hillsides to sleep on bare slopes where predators, such as puma, don’t have enough cover to get close.
All of this makes harvesting their fur quite complicated. Centuries ago, Andean civilizations developed the chaccu, a ritual gathering of vicuña herds to shear the fur before releasing the animals to the wild. In the 01990s, the population had grown enough to bring back the ancient tradition.
During a chaccu, people spread out in a loose circle up to a mile from a vicuña herd. They close in slowly, clapping their hands and making noise to concentrate the vicuñas in the center of the circle. Small chaccus may capture a dozen animals in one day, while larger ones can capture hundreds over a few days.
Today, chaccu isn’t exactly the same as it was five hundred years ago. An Incan ruler no longer presides over the ceremony. Communities now have trucks to drive out into the puna to get close to vicuña herds, trips that would previously have taken days or even weeks on foot. Shearing is now done quickly, with electric shears. Also, the fur is no longer kept for the royal family. It’s sold to international companies, many of which export it to Italy.
Chaccu organizers register the date and location with their local government. Three government officials plus a veterinarian oversee each event and ensure that all vicuña protection protocols are followed correctly. SENASA’s plan to treat vicuña for mange relies on chaccu.
Veterinarian Óscar Áragon has worked with vicuña for years and comes from a family that has raised alpaca for at least six generations. He has a master’s degree in South American camelids from the National Altiplano University in Puno, Peru.
“There are three steps to a modern chaccu,” Áragon explains. “When a vicuña is caught, the veterinarian first checks it for disease and draws blood samples. If it is sick, it’s treated. If not, it’s sent to the second stage, where somebody checks the length of the fur. It must be at least seven centimeters long so they can shear off five centimeters. It takes two or three years for their fur to grow that long. If the fur is long enough, then the animal is taken to the shearing station.”
In the early 02000s, a kilo of uncleaned vicuña fur could sell for as much as $600 USD. According to biologist Felix de la Cruz Huamani, the price has been dropping steadily since, which could pose a threat to this ancestral practice. A large chaccu takes hundreds of people several days’ of work to carry out. Most communities hold chaccu as a cultural tradition and use the money they earn from selling the fur to subsidize the event.
As the price of vicuña fur plummets, some communities have started to appeal to the Peruvian government for help, asking for funding to continue holding chaccus. Ongoing political chaos in Peru has hampered efforts to get needed support from the government. If the government won’t help, the second line of defense is tourism.
In 02022, two communities in the north of the Ayacucho region, Ocros and Santa Cruz de Hospicio, invited tourists to participate in chaccu. Armando Pariona Antonio grew up in Ayacucho and has worked with vicuña for over fifteen years. He created the company Vicunga Travel, named for the scientific name of the vicuña, to bring tourists to communities in Ayacucho. There are a lot of challenges, he says, to making chaccu a tourist activity.
“They hold chaccus wherever the vicuña are, and that’s always a remote place at high altitude. Also, communities need a lot of training on how to work with tourists.” Despite the challenges, Pariona Antonio is determined to help communities continue the tradition.
Felix de la Cruz Huamani believes we can look at the challenge of protecting the vicuña from a different angle.
“Landowners who have a land management plan for vicuña are required to protect and improve the ecosystem as part of their commitment to protect the vicuña,” explained de la Cruz Huamani. “We know that the vicuña’s habitat is rich in water. If we focus on the benefits of the ecosystem, we see that cities in Peru all depend on the water that comes from the vicuña’s habitat.” As the climate changes and water becomes more scarce, focusing national attention on the conservation of the vicuña’s habitat as a water source may have a bigger impact on protecting the vicuña than tourism or selling fur.
Peru’s environmental goals for 02030 include strategies for improving species conservation and reducing ecosystem damage. However, political instability is a significant challenge in meeting these targets. The Ministry of Environment, which is responsible for the 02030 goals, had four different ministers in 02022.
In the end, what is most likely to save the vicuña from all the threats it faces is its strong cultural bond with Indigenous Andeans. Now that they have reestablished the tradition of chaccu, communities that coexist with wild vicuña are determined to not lose the practice again.
“Nowhere else in the world do people have this kind of interaction with wild animals,” Pariona Antonio said. “It is a unique practice that comes to us from our Wari ancestors, the civilization that was in Ayacucho before the Inca conquered them.”
Peru’s Indigenous Andeans who honor their ancestral traditions may be the vicuña’s best bet for survival.
Enlarge / Mycobacterium tuberculosis. (credit: Getty | NIH/NIAID)
A judge in Washington issued an arrest warrant Thursday for a Tacoma woman who has refused to have her active, contagious case of tuberculosis treated for over a year, violating numerous court orders. The judge also upheld an earlier order to have her jailed, where she can be tested and treated in isolation.
On Thursday, the woman attended the 17th court hearing on the matter and once again refused a court order to isolate or comply with testing and treatment—an order that originally dates back to January 19, 2022. Pierce County Superior Court Judge Philip Sorensen rejected her objections to being treated and upheld a finding of contempt. Though it remains unclear what her objections are, the woman's lawyer suggested it may be a problem with understanding, according to The News Tribune. The Tacoma-Pierce County Health Department, however, argued that she “knowingly, willfully, and contemptuously violated this court’s orders,” noting the lengthy process and numerous proceedings and discussions in which interpreters, translated documents, and speakers of her native language were made available.
Sorenson ordered a civil warrant for her arrest, to be enforced on or after March 3, and again ordered her to jail to undergo involuntary testing and treatment until health officials deem it safe to release her. The order also authorized the Pierce County Jail to place her in a facility equipped to handle her isolation, testing, and treatment.
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