Brian Boyd was in his forties when he became a literary Darwinist, though he would prefer that you not use that term. “Evolutionary critics,” he writes in his new book On the Origin of Stories “should appeal not to a founding father”—such as Darwin—“but to a live and empirically accountable research program.”

Boyd, an English professor at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, made his academic reputation as Vladimir Nabokov’s biographer.  He now sets out to understand not just one man’s imagination but that of the whole species.  Boyd is determined to prove that our affinity for inventing stories plays a role in the survival of humankind. 

In On the Origin of Stories, he makes his case for “evocriticism,” the term he’d like you to use, as the “first truly comprehensive literary theory.”  Since the first known cave paintings in Chauvet, France, he argues, fiction has proven socially strategic for human beings.  Imagining scenarios we have yet to confront in reality prepares us to respond more creatively to future circumstances as they arise.

The evocritical approach is in part a response to the dominance of post-structuralist theory and the claim that any reading is informed by culture. On the Origin of Stories attempts to ground literary studies in fundamental questions about human life usually addressed in the sciences.  In doing so, it strives to give literary scholarship  renewed relevance in the eyes of those who run universities and fund research.

One of Boyd’s strengths is his willingness to confront the many arguments others have raised against evocriticism, but he fudges his rebuttal to at least one of those critiques. In response to the claim that our affinity for fiction is not an adaptation in itself but a byproduct of other strategic developments, Boyd responds, “An evolutionary approach to literature…simply requires that we take seriously that evolution has powerfully shaped…our minds and behavior. We can do that whether…fiction is an adaptation, byproduct, or some combination of the two.” 

The greater weakness of On the Origin of Stories is unfortunately fundamental. Boyd claims that there is an evolutionary basis for our attachment to fiction in a moment when, with regard to literature, at least, that attachment is on the wane.  He asks, in developing his counter-argument, why, “in a world of necessity, we choose to spend so much time caught up in stories that both teller and told know never happened and never will?”  Even for those who deeply appreciate fiction, the logic of this question resonates more than Boyd’s attempt to refute it.  Perhaps thousands of years will prove nonfiction a momentary preoccupation, but in the meantime, it is hard to agree that fiction has served us more than fact. ♦

It all started a few thousand years back with a naked couple and an apple. Since then, scholars have been toiling with what knowledge is acceptable to consume and share. In their new book, For the Common Good, Matthew W. Finkin and Robert C. Post provide a context for the current debates regarding what professors can and cannot do, in and out of the classroom.

They begin with the benchmark 1915 Declaration of Principles of Academic Freedom and Academic Tenure drafted by the American Association of University Professors, and the subsequent 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure jointly drafted by the AAUP and the Association of American Colleges. These documents establish the expectation that “institutions of higher education are conducted for the common good and not to further the interest of either the individual teacher or the institution as a whole. The common good depends upon the free search for truth and its free exposition.”

Throughout much of history, this was not the case. That initial demand that “…of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat…,” has persistently haunted free-thinking academics. Until the Middle Ages, professors were used as marionettes delivering only the bits of information that were pre-approved by the church, institutional administrators or private university donors. If they transgressed the regulated boundaries of thought, there were consequences. In 1633 the church persecuted Galileo for touting heliocentrism. In 1915 Wharton’s Board of Trustees condemned a professor whose socialist teachings went against their benefactor’s capitalistic mission. Even now, public opinion continues to censor what universities can do. In 2003, outraged conservative citizens protested the University of North Carolina’s liberal freshman reading assignment–Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America.

This later type of antagonism has been dominating the academic freedom conversations of the last decade. It’s no secret that the Bush administration elicited powerful reactions from a largely liberal professoriate; those emotions have been funneled into the classroom, much to the chagrin of conservatives and fundamentalists who are painted as the academic-freedom-nemeses of the 21st century. Prior to the Declaration, the debates focused on “whether academic freedom should exist, contemporary controversies assume the desirability of academic freedom and attempt to spell out its implications.” Does academic freedom now imply that that these professors have the right to do whatever they want in their classrooms? Or, are these politicized classrooms merely furthering the personal interests of opinionated professors instead of furthering the common good?

The professoriate may be above the manipulative strings of administrations and politics, thanks to the Declaration. They are not, however, granted the leisure to run buck-wild with the First Amendment:

Academic freedom is not the freedom to speak or to teach just as one wishes. It is the freedom to pursue the scholarly profession, inside and outside the classroom, according to the norms and standards of that profession.

This common understanding clarified by Finkin and Post has been adopted by hundreds of educational institutions around the country. It permits for a relative uniformity in the rights of the American professoriate. Professors are free to research, create and publish new knowledge, as long as they conduct that research according to professional expectations. They are free to teach what they want within the realm of their expertise, as long as they educate their students and don’t indoctrinate them with limited perspectives. And, finally, they are free to speak as citizens regarding matters on and off campus as long as those expressions don’t render them unfit for the classroom. “Free to” and “as long as” being equally significant.

Finkin and Post explain the theoretical justifications of their tenets of academic freedom methodically. They also try to make each freedom relevant; they pull from precedent cases where AAUP’s Committee A clarified discrepancies between professorial leaps and the consequent penalties. They do this most effectively in their chapter on “The Freedom of Teaching”; this is the only aspect of academic freedom that they highlight with contemporary controversy. Modern accusations of teachers misusing their freedom are in regards to the introduction of extraneous “political or ideological commentary into their courses and their failure to maintain neutrality.” All other chapters go so far as to highlight touchstone AAUP cases, but stop short of providing a context for how that freedom fits in with the modern academic atmosphere.

As professors of law (The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Yale, respectively), Finkin and Post are careful to offer caveats regarding material not covered within the 155 pages of text and the 106 pages of periphery resources. However, certain omissions interfere with their ability to make this synthesis of academic freedom fully rounded. For example, it is curious that the deep connection both authors have with AAUP’s Committee A is not made explicit (Finkin was chairman from 1980-1990 and is presently a consultant and Post has been a consultant since 2008).

The defined principals of academic freedom and the pragmatic legalities upheld by AAUP’s Committee A are thoroughly and clearly explained. However, the philosophical motivation for pedagogical liberty is parsed in a less satisfying way. The fuzzy title of “common good” sounds noble, but in a society as complex and diverse as America, its meaning is nebulous. If all academic freedom is meant to serve the common good, then who gets to decide what that good is? ♦

Lawrence Osborne is not your mother’s travel writer. Ironically, he may be your grandmother’s. This is not to suggest that his new book, Bangkok Days: A Sojourn in the Capital of Pleasure, is stodgy or uptight. Quite the opposite. Osborne is not above dabbling in the local methamphetamine of choice yaa maa, visiting sex clubs, dutifully accepting a line of expensive coke, and playing gigolo—for one unsuccessful night—for an aging Japanese woman.

There is an old-fashioned earnestness to Osborne that hearkens back to the Lost Generation. Save for a few pesky decades, he could fit right in with the Hemingways and the Fitzgeralds and Gertrude Stein. Like his disillusioned forebears, he is an expat looking for an escape. Paris no longer offers the chance to disappear that it once did. To truly get lost, Bangkok is the only viable option. A paralyzing mixture of ancient and ultra-modern, East and West, dignified and gaudy, traditional and cosmopolitan, Bangkok presents such a dizzying assault to every sense that it seems almost impossible not to lose oneself there.

In place of the expats of the 1920s are the so-called farangs (“foreign giants”)—middle-aged Englishmen, Australians, Scots, Spaniards, “lammers” looking for anonymity and an opportunity for self-invention. He writes, “Westerners choose Bangkok as a place to live precisely because they can never understand it, for even the Thai script, that variation of written Sanskrit, is impossible to master. It’s this ignorance which comforts the farang. However conversant in Thai culture, he will never get close to the bottom of it.”

Osborne resists the dual impulses of the contemporary travel writer: to sentimentalize and to sensationalize. He has not come to Thailand on a spiritual quest—to eat, pray, love, as it were. Nor has he gone the Travel Channel route and sought the most beautiful beach(!) or the weirdest food(!) or the sexiest women(!). Granted, the sex and the weird foods are there. Osborne eats a giant waterbug, procured from a shady “insect pimp” who wraps it delicately in a pink paper napkin. He introduces a young prostitute named Porntip who is passed around the expat community like a highly-recommended novel at a book club. He meets Thai sex workers who dress as nuns and work only in pairs. Yet for a book subtitled A Sojourn in the Capital of Pleasure, Osborne deals with these subjects with surprising subtlety and discretion. We are spared the fluids, the motions, the sounds, the smells. Michel Houellebecq or Henry Miller, he is not.

Though Bangkok Days bursts with local color and historical context, the Thais and their perceived “exoticism” are not the central focus. It is the Western farang that is placed under the microscope for further inspection. Like these men, the book is equal parts heartbreak and humor. The travelers have accepted their fates as broken men, yet they do so with a kind of stubborn, good-natured resolve. These men are, above all else, lonely. But Osborne suggests that this loneliness is voluntary, brought on by the impulse to disappear completely. “No one ever truly appreciates how much Robinson Crusoe enjoyed his solitude,” he writes with a nod to Defoe’s lonely island dweller. He is a man alone, the city of millions his island.

Bangkok is a metropolis awash in stimuli—visual, aural, sexual—but Osborne sidesteps the rhapsodic, adjective-drunk prose of most travel writing. No “sun-drenched beaches,” “quaint cobblestone streets,” “picturesque vistas,” and “charming villages” for him. Yet when he allows himself to write sentimentally, his words take on a new grace and poignancy. His brief forays into the poetic seem earned and necessary, not frivolous or self-indulgent.

The Mae Nang shrine is draped with khanom garlands, submerged in incense smoke. Into the canal that runs beside it pilgrims liberate the eels and fish which they buy as karma-improving offerings from vendors nearby. It is lovely to watch them kneel by the water’s edge and pop open the plastic bags containing the animals, then watch them swim away—the latter startled, probably, and confused by their sudden good fortune.

We forgive him the infrequent tear in the eye because he has not spent the rest of the book weeping—over the beauty of a centuries-old temple, over the intrusion of American capitalism, over the irreparable damage that has come to a great city that has quietly accepted its role as the Las Vegas of the East. ♦

Molly Haskell, author of feminist film criticism’s canonical From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies (1974) has always been fascinated by females in film. So it is fitting that she would choose to write her first book in over ten years on Gone With the Wind, a film that boasts one of the most magnetic female characters in the history of cinema, Scarlett O’Hara.

Haskell removes Gone With the Wind from that ossifying curio cabinet reserved for American icons in Frankly My Dear: Gone With the Wind Revisited. She invites the indelible characters of Scarlett and Rhett, Mammy and Melanie off their wax museum pedestals, reflecting on the endurance of a myth that still contains a deceptive amount of power. Adopting a mix of stylistic stances, the book is at various points a memoir, a three-part biography of star Vivien Leigh, author Margaret Mitchell, and producer David O. Selznick, a cultural history, and a piece of extended film criticism.

As a teenage girl growing up in the South, Haskell witnessed firsthand the moment Gone With the Wind lit the American imagination on fire, selling more tickets than any film in history. Just as Titanic exemplified adventure and desire for teens of the 1990s, GWTW (fan shorthand) defined the romantic ideals of hormonal Depression-era girls, and Haskell and her friends were swept up in the cultural mania. She is careful to stipulate that she’s had a complicated relationship with GWTW over the years, grappling with the racism and sexism that it contains. But traces of her endearing, fan-girlish admiration remain, as when she breathlessly describes Clark Gable playing Rhett Butler as “a man, who, for all his strength, his power and sophistication, is rendered utterly helpless by love.”

Haskell takes well-informed guesses at the psychological motivations of Rhett and Scarlett, interpreting Rhett as a “surrogate mother” to Scarlett, and defining the relationship between Scarlett and Melanie as “a love story every bit as intense in its own way as Scarlett and Rhett’s.” She also unearths some amusing factoids, such as the first draft of Margaret Mitchell’s novel featuring a spunky heroine named “Pansy O’Hara,” a name that was later changed to “Scarlett” at the insistence of her editor. More disturbing is the “curse” that followed the creators of GWTW—Margaret Mitchell became reclusive after achieving fame, never wrote another novel, and was killed by a taxi in 1949. Vivien Leigh suffered from mental illness and failed to have the great movie career that the success of GWTW promised, and David O. Selznick eventually lost his production company.

In the final chapter, Haskell strains to place GWTW in the current zeitgeist, as she inserts obligatory contemporary references to the Obama campaign, Apatow comedies and Sarah Palin (a modern day Scarlett!). The most evocative description of GWTW’s enduring hold on the cultural imagination appears a chapter before this:

Only movie stars at their most otherworldly and magnetic in a darkened movie theater could provide such direct conduits to those adolescent passions too confused and forbidden to be disclosed to the light of day. And only on a Hollywood back lot could a producer achieve the idealized mythical South that Selznick wanted, the Confederacy that colonized our dreams, and gave a nation its enchanted past.

Haskell’s enthusiasm for Gone With the Wind, and her infectious adoration for the quixotic Scarlett, affirms that the film deserves to be taken just as seriously as those other AFI Top 100 behemoths, Citizen Kane and The Godfather. With the passion of a true devotee, she convinces us, in the end, to give a damn. ♦

Ever since builder Robert Moses looked out over New York and envisioned a great network of highways and parks, America’s cities were reshaped for the car. The resulting suburban sprawl has changed what it means to live in a community and to have a city center.

In his latest book, Welcome to the Urban Revolution: How Cities are Changing the World, Jeb Brugmann urges readers to consider the city as it once was, and to restore cities as hubs of innovation—“urban labs” capable of solving problems like poverty and sustainability.

Brugmann, who has been an urban strategy consultant to major cities around the world, reframes the idea of globalization as a global spread of urbanization—forming a single, worldwide system that he refers to as “the City.” Through it, local events are amplified as global ones. In Brugmann’s view, urban planning and the emergence of cities has shifted from an organic process based on industry and community. It is now about driving profit, even if it means building communities in unstable and unsustainable living conditions.

“In the 1960-80s, we abandoned a very different approach to city building—American traditions of urbanism that had made our country an industrial and cultural powerhouse, such as the mixed industrial-commercial-residential neighborhoods of the early- and mid-20th century,” he explained in a recent interview. “We replaced urbanism as an approach to city building with the industrial batch production of standard-issue single-function cityscapes.”

The result of this new “mass-production approach” to city building is that, instead of creating “efficient and productive place-based systems,” we are trading in communities as commodities, “to be purchased, flipped and traded as generic square-footage like pork bellies or bitumen.”

Brugmann clings heavily to his conceit, blaming the mismanaged growth of modern cities for everything from climate change to terrorism. He traces the rise of the city as a democratizing phenomenon, where a population collects, forms centralized communities, and then organizes in order to work toward its own best interest.

His focus is on planning and design—not only in the physical sense, but also in a philosophical sense. Considerations about blending residential, commercial and industrial space are comparable to considerations about nurturing equality and a sense of community.

“All this brings us face-to-face again with the failed public-private model of government zoning and development subsidies,” he said. The result is thousands of square miles of temporarily profitable, homogenous areas that are automobile-based.

In a sense, Brugmann is arguing for the collective power of a dense city as the ultimate form of grassroots living. It offers a connected community, not rows of tract homes and a strip mall, but an interconnection of neighborhoods, central meeting spaces and commercial opportunity. Cities generally provide their residents with higher levels of education, larger social networks and more resources, enabling them to leverage their own power for social and political change. It is what Brugmann calls “society’s self-organizing potential” that keeps cities democratic.

Though the outlook may be willfully single-minded, it still offers a unique perspective on the tendency of people to move toward centers of opportunity, to socialize and organize around some cause greater than the one inside their own homes. In an age of gated communities, where commuters move from one isolated building to another in their climate-controlled bubbles, Welcome to the Urban Revolution reconsiders the value of urban living as a green and democratic enterprise.

From emerging villages in Ecuador to the skyscraper cities of Japan, Brugmann traces the success of all modern social experiment to the city lab. He concludes with a discussion of how the current economic crisis is a direct result of communities planned as investments, with artificial social spaces popping up to serve these ready-made neighborhoods, but without the social infrastructure that makes a community sound. Brugmann argues that a mall is not a city center, and a movie theater is not an entertainment district.

His words will resonate with those who are suffering through the current mortgage crisis, trapped in overvalued homes in poorly planned, hastily concocted suburbs. ♦

I heard a story once, from a failed female conquest of one of the characters mentioned in Jeff Johnson’s book. It was so lasciviously devilish that when she had finished, a group of us sat in complete silence for several minutes and I had to  literally pick my jaw off the table.

With that memory in mind, I was looking forward to reading Tattoo Machine: Tall Tales, True Stories, and My Life in Ink. It is a colourful memoir rather than a fact-filled discussion of the tattoo profession and I was gripped, finishing the book in two sittings.

Johnson speaks tenderly of his profession, lapsing frequently into philosophical ponderings over its future in changing times (technology, regulations and competition are revolutionising the art of inking, like so many other fields). His impulse for humanity is undoubtedly a result of spending each and every day in close proximity to a complex variety of characters, listening to them hold forth, good or bad. “There are times when I’ve glimpsed the rosy pork blossoms of hell’s flora crawling inside of people, brushed up against abominations poorly disguised as human beings,” Johnson tells us. This particular observation leads into a filmic retelling of just such an occasion, which begins with a white Cadillac pulling up outside the shop late on a dark winter’s night, unleashing denizens of the criminal underworld on its closing doors.

Tattooing is a profession for “oddly shaped pegs,” Johnson explains, and indeed descriptions of his colleagues at the Sea Tramp recall the Magnificent Seven. A band of modern day cowboys always on the move and making their living with good old-fashioned handiwork. The hothead, the sharp mover, the ladykiller motivated by “money and spring beaver”—they’re all there, ready for action day and night. It makes you wonder, in fact, why anyone would want to be a rockstar when as a tattoo artist you get all the perks—girls, money, parties, status, and adoration—without the constant worry that a receding hairline will put a swift end to your careering and careening. For example, Johnson’s business partner, Don Deaton, despite having entered his seventies, is still a vivacious presence in the shop, continuing to apply needle to flesh (albeit rarely nowadays).

It took Johnson decades (and the love of a good woman) to become manager of Portland, Oregon’s oldest tattoo shop. “Along the way,” he writes, “you learn about people, and that teaches you something about yourself.” His prose is peppered with management tips that apply across the board, most memorably “pay attention to the toilet!”

Tattoo Machine is not the place to learn about tattooing’s 3,000-year-old history. Instead it is an opportunity for readers to escape humdrum worklives and rub shoulders with characters they have most proximally encountered on their TV screens: serial killers, nymphomaniacs, straight-up maniacs, and gangsters. This is an approachable and engaging read for anyone who has ever been kicked out of a bar (or wanted to be, for that matter). Johnson loves telling stories, he admits, and although I was disappointed that none of his tales came close in sordidness to the one told to me the day my jaw physically dropped, he tells them well. The book crackles with possibility, occasionally igniting into full-blown episodes of sex, violence, and excess. Sometimes they suffer from the smoothed-over edges of frequent retelling, but I admit that’s more likely a reflection of my own high expectations of sordidness. ♦

One part self-help, one part serious science and one part bedside psychologist, The Talent Code: Greatness Isn’t Born. It’s Grown. Here’s How by author and Outside contributing editor Daniel Coyle (Lance Armstrong’s War, Hardball: A Season in the Projects) looks at the development of exceptional talent. Throughout history, “talent hotbeds” have sprung up producing what we call genius and talent. In this book, Coyle discusses how to operate at the “edge of your ability” in order to uncoil your own “talent code.”

Coyle takes readers on a whirlwind, Indiana Jones-style adventure through history and science to challenge their preconceptions about learning and so-called genius talent. He boldly explores an area that few others have—the neurophysiology of learning. There, he explains the connection between myelin, a substance your brain creates only when in a state of action and perfected “deep practice.” It’s in deep practice that you actually make the most mistakes, but correct them quickly and learn from them even more quickly.

Along Coyle’s tour de talent, he interviews renowned Olympic coaches, top educators, cutting edge researchers and bona fide geniuses to prove that in almost all cases, nurture outbids nature. Why would our genetics waste energy creating a genius blacksmith in today’s world, or a math genius during the Dark Ages? poses Coyle. They didn’t, and they won’t. Talent, even perceived genius, of every kind is the act of nurturing a myelin-coated mind. Even so-called child protégés like Mozart and the Bronte sisters had close to a decade of practice by the time they were famous. Practice is talent.

Coyle doesn’t bother to address oft-misinterpreted ideas about genetic predisposition or natural selection, which I was glad to see. Disregarding ideas that have spawned racism the world over may appear to be a smart move, but it comes at the cost of ignoring whether genetics have any significant impact on talent and myelin production. Perhaps that’s a whole other book.

“Thrashing blindly doesn’t help. Reaching does,” says Coyle. He breaks the concept of myelin making into three sort of do-able steps: deep practice, emotional motivation, and finding or becoming a great teacher a.k.a a “talent whisperer.” Citing examples including Brazilian soccer players and their coaches, the Albert Einstein, Ray LaMontagne, Aristotle and the Florentine art renaissance, he plucks out the most easily repeatable and applicable learning and teaching techniques. Coyle is heavy-handed with his research but not with his language. He uses everyday examples to explain complex systems.

By merely understanding the structures of the uber-talented’s brain, you can start to think, and even nurture yourself, in a different way. It’s no shortcut to success or building skill, though. Expert talent takes time—about 10,000 hours of it. But knowing that there is a formula ought to excite scientists and average Joes alike.

There’s even an exact language of talent. Praise, the way a parent or teacher gives it away, isn’t the best motivator, it turns out. What works best is “speaking to ground-level effort, affirming the struggle,” says Coyle. In fact, praise can send the message to look smart and hide your mistakes rather than to try harder and learn how to do better.

The Talent Code is an insightful read for anyone who’s desperately wanted to thrash that do-gooder coach/teacher/parent who insisted that “practice makes perfect.” At last, an eloquent adult who not only claims that they were essentially right, but also manages to do it in a way that’s both entertaining and forward-thinking. This is a must-read for 2009. ♦

Water is a precious, life sustaining and finite resource. Yet Americans undervalue it. We pay next to nothing for it, and literally flush it down the toilet every day. This paradox is central to Robert Glennon’s Unquenchable: America’s Water Crisis and What to Do About It. If we don’t fundamentally change our relationship to water, he argues, we’ll continue pissing it away until each and every one of us—not just those in the arid West—is left high and dry.

Glennon believes that the water crisis has already begun. With Unquenchable, he details how we, living in one of the most water-rich nations on Earth, have mismanaged this most precious resource, and outlines how we might change our habits and reverse the crisis. Through dozens of vividly recounted stories, Glennon invites us to witness, firsthand, water abuse and its costly consequences. See how dried-out salmon runs cancelled the Pacific coast’s $400 million per year commercial salmon fishing season. Inadequate water supplies forced regulators in Idaho, Arizona and Montana to deny permits for new coal-fired power plants. Lake Superior, the world’s largest freshwater body, has grown too shallow to float fully loaded cargo ships.

So how are Americans responding to the crisis? Poorly, if Unquenchable is any indication. Georgia’s Lake Lanier—the freshwater supply for five million Metro Atlanta residents—came within 90 days of evaporating in the winter of 2008, prompting the government to ban watering lawns, washing cars and filling swimming pools. Rain, coupled with a 15 percent reduction of water usage, raised the lake level two feet over the course of three months. Governor Perdue, who’d held a public prayer vigil for rain only months earlier, eased the restrictions. Nine months later, the lake was back down to emergency levels. Glennon writes: “The evidence is everywhere—though if it is noticed it’s washed away with the next drenching rain.”

Elsewhere, poor policy decisions promise to exacerbate the problem. The Energy Policy Act of 2005, for instance, requires that 7.5 billion gallons of corn ethanol supplement our national gasoline supply by 2012. But corn is the thirstiest of all domestic crops, and it requires between 1,700 and 2,500 gallons of water to grow enough corn to produce a single gallon of ethanol. All said, it’ll take 13 to 19 trillion gallons of water to satisfy the 2012 ethanol quota. One ethanol plant in Minnesota, “The Land of 10,000 Lakes,” has already dried up scores of neighboring wells.

With Unquenchable, Glennon is joining a tradition that began with Marc Reisner’s 1986 classic Cadillac Desert. Subtitled “The American West and Its Disappearing Water,” it was the first detailed history of how development-driven policies and engineering feats aimed at bringing water to the otherwise uninhabitable, bone-dry West have threatened delicate desert ecosystems, and limited future water resource development. Twenty-three years later, Glennon tells us, the crisis has spread to the rest of the country. The Ipswich River in Massachusetts has dried up in each of the last seven years. Huge sinkholes have opened up north of Tampa due to overzealous groundwater pumping. The Tennessee town of Orme ran plumb out of water in 2008, so they trucked it in from Alabama.

Glennon is a law professor at University of Arizona, where he first got involved with water policy through interdisciplinary work—researching water law—with the university’s hydrology department. This background asserts itself when Glennon offers legislation-driven solutions to the crisis. Sure, he promotes creative conservation techniques. But the bulk of the work—quantifying and managing groundwater supplies and usage, overhauling sewage systems that combine storm water with domestic sewage, removing barriers to water transfers and overseeing those transfers—he says needs to be achieved via federal legislation and a single, unified water policy.

In the past Congress has deferred to states regarding water policy with disastrous effect. At least 35 states are currently embroiled in battles with their neighbors over water rights. The majority of states manage their water using outdated policies developed before hydrology existed as a field. One example is the “right of capture” doctrine. If you manage to pump it out of the ground, you can use as much water as you want for whatever you want. It’s a classic “Tragedy of the Commons” scenario, Glennon writes, giving limitless access to a limited supply.

One of the factors that makes Unquenchable so effective is its narrow focus on the United States. Several books have been published recently addressing the global water crisis, but none has offered such in-depth analysis. If formulating an outline for a comprehensive domestic water policy is a huge task, then creating a world water policy and squeezing it into a single book is next to impossible.

Not to worry, though. Only two months ago, the United Nations released a report, Water in a Changing World that operates as a companion piece to Unquenchable, detailing the crisis on the world stage and offering some first steps towards a wetter future.

Although Glennon’s proposed reforms run the gamut from composting toilets to taxing water, none of them will have any teeth if we don’t learn the true value of water. The average American pays only one-quarter of a cent per gallon for water, and hundreds of thousands of private wells pump it out of the ground absolutely free of charge. Until we recognize water as our most important natural resource—more important, even, than fossil fuels—there will never be the political will to make sweeping policy changes. Benjamin Franklin once observed, “When the well’s dry, we know the worth of water.” Let’s hope that he’s wrong, and we understand water’s worth before it’s gone. ♦

That shiny new iPhone you’re holding? The one with the sleek black profile and touchscreen? You may think it’s a technological advancement to cheer. But some believe it’s a threat to all that is good about Internet technology.

That’s what Harvard Law professor Jonathan Zittrain argues in The Future of the Internet—And How to Stop It. To Zittrain, the iPhone is an appliance—like your GE refrigerator, your CoffeeMate drip brewer, or your Black & Decker toaster oven. It was developed by a single party for a predetermined set of uses. Sure, you can download hundreds of applications for your iPhone to serve almost any function you can think of. But they all serve at the pleasure of Apple, which exercises with impunity its power to adopt or reject those functions. At any point, for any reason, Apple can take them away, or start charging its customers more for their use, or cut off the iPhone entirely from third-party developers. The iPhone is a walled garden party and Apple guards the gate.

This closed, controlled system of development and use stands in direct contrast to the ethos of openness and innovation by which the Internet developed. Zittrain fears that’s all in the past: the iPhone future is one in which innovation is stifled by proprietary control. The greatest achievement of appliances like the iPhone is their success in hiding just how dangerous that future may be. For the iPhone nation is like Orwell’s Oceania, couched in the benevolent terms of utopia but operated on the principles of absolute control—of “perfect enforcement” of proprietary rules.

How did we get here? Why are we giving away our communicative freedoms to a handful of commercial empires? Zittrain, the tech-savvy co-director of Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, takes us back to the origins of the Internet and argues that its future is imperiled by the very attributes that led to its success.

The Internet was formed haphazardly in an academic “backwater” of open collaboration and generativity (a word Zittrain uses to describe the freedom of anyone to generate functionality within a system like the Internet). As more people joined the open party, they added their own functionality where they felt it was lacking. No place to check the weather in your hometown? You could create it. The possibilities were literally endless.

But the Internet’s founders had trusted users’ goodwill and failed to implement a framework for security. The system that was so open to innovation was also open to abuse—from spam, viruses, scams and identity theft. The more people used the Internet, the greater the temptation became for others to abuse it.

We’ve reached a breaking point, says Zittrain. Most Internet users are no longer willing to put up with the abuse that has become a daily reality, and so they increasingly choose security over innovation, control over freedom. Every time you let Norton Antivirus delete a document for you, every time you allow your ISP to block access to certain websites it deems dangerous, every time you allow a third party to make choices about what you can or can’t do with your communicative technology, you’re buying into a kind of Orwellian future.

If this all sounds a little alarmist, well…it is. Zittrain’s OpenNet Initiative has also studied the practices of abusive Internet filtering by national governments, and knows what can happen when control trumps freedom. In China, for instance, the government routinely shuts down opposing political voices. Just a few weeks ago, government censors struck against the grass-mud horse, whose name in Mandarin sounds strikingly similar to a phrase that translates roughly to “fuck your mother.” The animal’s sudden popularity amongst Chinese YouTubers with a juvenile sense of humor and subversive political agenda incurred the wrath of the censors, who suppressed the video and issued a decree on March 30 banning the trafficking of violent or pornographic obscenities by Chinese Internet users.

Not the most serious example of Chinese online censorship, but you get the idea. Zittrain is fighting an uphill battle because we, as Americans, don’t experience overt censorship or control on a daily basis. And those highly visible examples that we do encounter—say, being sued by the RIAA for downloading a Britney Spears album—don’t hold the highest stakes.

We take the openness of the Internet for granted because of the Wild West, capitalist sensibility that drives consumer technology. The hope of monetary gain can be a powerful incentive for innovation. Profiting from online ventures isn’t what’s evil to Zittrain; the danger is when we let any singular body control our use of the technology.

We’ve already seen this type of control before, in the form of proprietary networks of the 1990s like AOL, CompuServe and Prodigy. They captured the consumer market before Internet access was widely available, but their top-down business models—content was provided through corporate partnerships and on a subscription basis—constricted their usefulness. When users began migrating toward the wider Web, these networks could no longer compete with the infinite streams of user-generated content. Their users were like a generation born and bred under an iron-fisted dictatorship and freed in the midst of adulthood: many probably had no idea they were living in the grip of such tyranny. Now, argues Zittrain, we’re once again at the verge of becoming just such a generation.

But this book is not just an alarmist tale, a warning of inevitable apocalypse. Hence the second part of its title: how to stop it. Zittrain has some ideas of how to get us back on the right path, and the key to it all is generativity. “We need a strategy that blunts the worst aspects of today’s popular generative Internet and PC without killing these platforms’ openness to innovation,” he writes. “Give users a reason to stick with the technology and the applications that have worked so surprisingly well,” he continues, “and we may halt the movement toward a non-generative digital world.”