Stuff Matters

Stuff Matters: Exploring the Marvelous Materials That Shape Our Man-Made World
© 2014 Mark Miodownik
272 pages

Stuff Matters begins with a photo of the authorhaving coffee on the roof of his London flat, the table before him scattered with papers and the unremarkable clutter of everyday life.  That clutter, however, is composed of stuff that makes modern life unimaginable without it.  Stuff Matters scrutinizes each object in turn, and is thus a bundle of microhistories with  strong scientific undercurrent.  Mark Miodownik combines a history of how a material like porcelain came into being with an analysis of why they work -- why glass is transparent, why stainless steel can effectively repair itself,  how prosthetics can fool the body into thinking they're just part of the gang.  Miodownik often adds a personal touch, as he has a genuine obsession with materials science: if he's stabbed or thrown through a window, his first thoughts are about the feel and wonder of the materials he's passing through (or which are passing through him).   He would share Carl Sagan's conviction that the beauty of a living thing -- in Miodownik's case, just a thing -- is not the atoms that go into it, but the way they're put together.  After all, diamonds and graphite have the same atomic core, being made of pure carbon, but they're fundamentally different substances because of the way their carbon atoms are connected. 

Exploding the Phone

Exploding the Phone: The Untold Story of the Teenagers and Outlaws who Hacked Ma Bell
© Phil Lapsley 2013
416 pages

WANTED HARVARD MIT Fine Arts no. 13 notebook. (121 pages) & 40 page reply K.K. & C.R. plus 2,800; battery; m.f. El presidente no esta aqui asora, que lastima. B. David Box 11595 St. Louis, MO 63105.
[...]
Locke sat back. Someone had put a cryptic ad in the newspaper. He’d responded. They sent him a letter. In mirror writing. In Russian. In 1967. During the cold war.
Spy ring.
It just didn’t get much cooler than this.

Book preview, available on WIRED.com, and on Kindle.

Exploding the Phone opens with a cryptic ad in a campus newspaper, one that swells with intrigue as a bored college student responds to the ad and receives an ominous message in return, penned in code.   The code only heightens both the student and the readers' interest, and lures him and us into  the exciting world of....playing with the telephone.  Who knew the dial tone had mysteries to uncover, let alone ones that would lead to FBI investigations and multi-million dollar infrastructure shakeups?  Well, not me!  Easily the most memorable revelation of reading CYBERPUNKS last year was that once upon a time,  teenagers and tech heads were utterly fascinated by the telephone network, and poured hours of their time into exploring its innards and fabricating devices to manipulate it from payphones. Katie Hafner's work on the 'outlaws' of the electronic frontier quickly saw these phone phreaks move to computers, but Exploding the Phones is a fuller history of the phone-hacking heyday, the sixties and early seventies.

Before transistors were commonly used in AT&T's network,  the components of it -- the phones switchboards, etc -- communicated to one another using a language of tones. This language was independently deciphered by teenagers and young people across the United States, many of them blind.  People found they could manipulate the system by whistling at the right pitch (2600 hz), or using toy whistles and recording tones. Some groups found each another, most notably a group of Harvard students who created a 'blue box' to navigate through the phone system. While this phone manipulation could allow people to make free phone calls, the early 'phone phreaks' had no one  to call.  The phone system was a world to explore, and those who mastered it could take pride in the doing of it.  Experienced phone freaks -- later known as phone "phreaks" after Esquire magazine discovered them --  often knew more about what the telephone system was capable of than the engineers themselves, as one named "Captain Crunch" demonstrated when he used an auditing system on one side of the country's network to listen in on FBI lines on the other side of the country.  (Helpful hint: if you're being investigated by the FBI, you really shouldn't tap their phones. They respond poorly to that.)

Although the phreaks' accomplishments were largely built on their own intelligence, passion, and time sunk into exploration and tinkering, they were aided considerably by AT&T.  "Ma Bell" then owned a legal monopoly on all telecommunications within the United States, and because of its frequent interactions with the government, it developed extensive documentation for every part of its system. It even issued instructions for sweeping the floors! Its technical manuals often found their way into the hands of phreaks --  some of whom dug in dumpsters to find them.  Other technical volumes found their way into university libraries, which is why many of the early phreakers were college students.  Before AT&T realized people were manipulating their system and began policing it more closely, bored AT&T operators and technicians often volunteered information to the 'kids' who were interested. Using tech journals and information gained from workers,  phreakers were often able to pretend to be technicians troubleshooting the network, and relied on internal operators to help them navigate through.

Not everyone was interested in simply exploring the network, however.  Some saw a  buck to be made in fabricating and selling  equipment that allowed technologically-uninterested people to cheat the phone company, and others -- like Abbie Hoffman -- saw a revolution.  To some in the 1960s anticulture,  IBM, AT&T, and DC were all  different heads on the same beast. Cheating AT&T's  long distance charges would deprive DC of tax income, which would, like, end the war in Vietnam, man.   The early phreakers disliked the idea of making money off it, but as network manipulation became more broadly known,  whatever control they had of the knowledge escaped. Hollywood celebrities were being charged with phone toll fraud on a regular basis, and AT&T was doing its utmost to end the party. Not only did it ratchet up the number of people it prosecuted for fraud, but once transistors arrived, AT&T was able to start building a more secure infrastructure.  Around the time same, computers arrived on the scene,  and the same minds and personalities that were capable of tinkering and obsessing with the phone network were attracted to  this new world.   (The greatest example of this would be Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs, both of whom made money selling blue boxes and who later became leading forces in the microcomputer revolution.  Kevin Mitnick and Susan "Thunder" were another two phone phreakers turned computer hackers, detailed in CYBERPUNKS.)

Exploding the Phones was a great read for me, building on that spark of wonder -- teens used to hack TELEPHONES? --  and putting it together with a lot of business, social, and legal history as the phreaking culture developed in full, and both the FBI and AT&T worked to respond to it. The author sometimes slips into a chatty, personal voice, but nothing about the book seems sloppy -- it is in fact extensively documented.  I was captivated, not only by this tour of an America in transition, but of the odd personalities who explored it first.

Related
Cyberpunks

The Ministry of Guidance Invites You Not To Stay

The Ministry of Guidance Invites You Not to Stay
© 2010 Hooman Majd
272 pages

Hooman Majd left Iran for the first time as a young boy, barely eight months old, and when his own son was eight months old, Majd returned. He returned with an American wife in tow,  and with more than a little trepidation. Majd was no stranger to Iran: he did grow up there, leaving for good only in 1979, and since then he'd visited many times in his capacity as a journalist. His familial ties with reformists in Iran, and his less-than-complimentary remarks on the government there, made him an object of concern to the state authorities.  Nevertheless, they allowed him to live again in Iran, this time for a year, so that his young boy could experience his familial homeland.  The Ministry of Guidance Invites You Not to Stay  records that year, as Majd digests the current state of Iran and the world.  It is not a travel memoir or a cultural journey, though elements of both are present. Instead, this amusingly-titled book is largely driven by Majd wrestling with his Iranian identity: is it still home, despite the changes since his youth and his long years living as an American abroad?

Short answer...yes. Mostly.  The longer answer is that while Majd is disturbed by the growth of a soft security state in Iran, distressed by the overcrowding and pollution in Tehran,  and unsettled by the apathy of the rising generation,  Iran is the irreplaceable land of his childhood, and one that accepted his wife and child with complete hospitality.  His young son was fawned over by strangers in the street, so much so that it disturbed his New York wife Karri. (Why did they want to take photos?)   Karri's stumbling Farsi was accepted and aided with stumbling English by shopkeepers and cab drivers, none of whom gave her the kind of grief they gave Majd over fair prices.   Although wealth for some in Iran is growing, decades of sanctions from the west have throttled opportunities for the young,  but instead of exploding in furore many have lapsed into fatalism. Some of that fatalism is inimically Persian, Majd allows;   even its practice of Islam, Shi'ism, is fatalistic in that it expects and sanctifies defeat and martyrdom. In his conversations with Iranians young and old, at parties and in private quarters with no bugged phones,  Majd records a lot of disgruntlement about the government's thought-and-morals police (the "Ministry of Guidance"), but people's specific problems with the government are confused and divided.  Many don't like the present state of affairs, but they can't agree on what  to do about it, or what goal they should arrive for. Even the arch-reformist Mohammad Khatami admits that Iran can't simply import the morals and politics of the west:  liberal democracy has to grafted into Persian culture, not replace it.,  When Majd decides to end his year-long stay back in Tehran, it is with a mixture of sadness and hope that he looks back on the country of his birth.

The Ministry of Guidance Invites You Not To Stay's  recollection of everyday experiences, cut with Majd's internal wrestling over his identity,  may not make it attractive to readers who want to learn about contemporary Iran in broad strokes; The Ayatollah Begs to Differ is more amenable to that goal.   If the reader is interested in every day life in Tehran, however, or a dual citizen's view about Iranian-American relations and Iran's promise, it's quick reading.

Alone

Alone: Britain, Churchill, and Dunkirk: Defeat Into Victory
© 2017 Michael Korda
544 pages

Judging by most World War 2 histories, the war only heats up once Hitler's rapid takeover of northern and western Europe is accomplished in the spring of 1940, and England is left facing a continent controlled by two execrable men and Mussolini.  The fall of the low countries and the fighting retreat of the Allied army happen so quickly that they're dispatched almost as a prologue to the greater drama. Alone takes that prologue as its subject, opening at Munich and moving quickly to the invasion of Poland and the state of war which followed.  Readers witness stiff desire not to fight again quickly replaced by a mixture of chivalrous indignation and less chivalrous resignation, as England again dispatches her army to Europe to check the German advance, standing alongside the even more resigned French. Here too are chronicled the desperate struggles by the Dutch and Belgian armies, who though colossally outmatched, refuse to yield .  The finish, of course, is the  great drama of Dunkirk, where the men of the British expeditionary force are surrounded by  the German advance, but escape to safety by means of a fleet of civilian ships, a brilliant of example of England expecting every man to do his duty -- even men out of uniform.  Korda notes that the triumphant escape of Dunkirk sometimes overshadows the sheer awfulness of getting there and enduring it: some regiments lost as many as two-thirds of their men, and the beach itself was a spectacle from Dante, filled with burning debris, scattered bodies, and the stench of both.  Alone is a personal history as well,  as a very young Michael Korda was just old enough to realize  something bad was happening; the Korda family's involvement in British and later American film industry adds an interesting flair to a more familiar subject.   Korda  strikes a good balance between narrative and detail, and includes a generous amount of in-text illustrations of personalities and movements. 

Related:

• With Wings Like Eagles: The Battle of Britain, Michael Korda. This was my favorite history read of 2011. 
• The Miracle of Dunkirk, Walter Lord
• Readers may also be interested in the film Darkest Hour, in which Gary Oldman plays Winston Churchill as he takes the reins during the fall of Europe and keeps English spirits up while the Dunkirk operation is underway. I watched it earlier in the week

To end, a quote from one of Churchill's addresses:

"...and I made it perfectly clear then that whatever happened in France would make no difference to the resolve of Britain and the British Empire to fight on, if necessary for years, if necessary alone.

We have before us an ordeal of the most grievous kind. We have before us many, many long months of struggle and of suffering. You ask, what is our policy? I will say: It is to wage war, by sea, land, and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us; to wage war against a monstrous tyranny never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalogue of human crime. That is our policy. You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: It is victory, victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory, however long and hard the road may be."

Yesterday's News: Shrinkwrapped Sunbather

"It takes a lot of sand to wear this costume, which is 80 per cent cellophane. The other 10 percent is bathing suit. It's the newest fad at Malibu beach, playspot of the Hollywood film colony. June Clyde is shown here is a cellophane wrapper keeping her schoolgirl complexion nice and fresh. Under the cellophane, so they say, the skin receives all the benefits of ultra-violent sun, producing tan without sunburn. Save the surface and you save all!"

From an April 1932 newspaper.

Mirrors of the Unseen

Mirrors of the Unseen:  Journeys in Iran

© 2006 Jason Elliot

432 pages

Readers uninterested in the origins and history of Islamic art, metaphysics, or pigeons, should skip to the next chapter, here.

In the late nineties, before Afghanistan was rendered more chaotic and dangerous than usual, Jason Elliot visited the country and was moved by it. Building on the success of that trip,  he looked over the border to Iran, a nation derided by the Afganis as full of sandwich-eating women, and decided to travel throughout it, as well. Mirrors of the Unseen collects the experiences of several trips made by Elliot throughout Iran, visiting it again and again as the seasons changed. What did not change was the ready willingness of Iranians to receive him  -- and ply him a surprising amount of spirits.    Elliot's interest in Iran is more cultural and historical than political, and as time passes he transforms from interviewing tourist to a man on pilgrimage, one with Iran's architectural wonders as its goal, working in historical recaps along the way, telling of the rise and fall of empires as he gazes at their ruins and proud reminders. He is particularly struck by the  predominant role of gardens in Persian culture and art, one that predates views of Heaven as a paradisaical garden. (Not by accident is the German title of this book Persia: God's Forgotten Garden.)   Elliot is sensitive about architecture in that it seems to affect him deeply, taking over his mind. Discussions with friends and discourses on Sassanian history fade into the background when Elliot takes in the fullness of a bazaar or mosque and begins to wax lyrical about plazas and windows.  He is self-conscious about some of his obsessions -- several chapters see him poring over historic maps and making measurements to figure out why a particular building isn't lined up the way symmetry  suggests it should -- to the point that he includes at least one disclaimer.    Of more general interest are Elliot's many conversations with Iranians of various ethnic groups; he never fails to find a friendly host wherever he travels, and those who do not have concealed stocks of ardent spirits have opium pipes.  (Similarly,  no one Elliot meets observes the laws against foreign television stations, but it's possible that the people most eager to host an Englishman were the most dubious about the currently-reigning politics.)   The Iranians featured here range from poor cab drivers to horse ranchers,   and unless they're selling something  they're extremely generous with their time and resources. 

Although the aesthetic tangents might throw some readers off, I personally enjoyed this curious mix of travel memoir, history, and architectural commentary. 

California Dreamin'

At some point in 1997 I saw this cover in a now-defunct WaldenBooks and was intrigued, both by the shoes and that oddly simple title: “DUCKY”.    The book was a fictional diary, rendered in a font-like handwriting, and it was part of a series of  journals by five fictional kids -- four 8th grade girls and one 10th-grade guy --  that I would become so enamored with that I finally developed a journal-writing habit of my own,  though there have been serious lapses since college. The series is special enough to me that it has survived, along with Roswell High, as part of my collection when the other books of my youth -- Goosebumps, Animorphs, Wishbone, the Boxcar Children books -- have passed away as donations or gifts .

The series begins when the eighth grade class of Vista  is moved to the high school building of their school to account for a surge in enrollment. Although middle school is already a time of transition, the kids’ exposure to so many older, near-adult students accelerates their own development as they encounter new influences.  Each of the teens brings their own private struggles with them, but they experience things together as well.

The characters, introduced as I met them:

• Christopher “Ducky” McRae is a sixteen year old who is introduced to the other four when he rescues them from a massive hazing incident. Ducky lives with his college-age brother, as their parents are archaeologists who both work overseas. Unique in being both older and the only guy, Ducky faces stresses in his older friendships (one best friend has become a jerk, the other is depressive and suicidal) and the oddity of becoming the older-brother figure to four girls, all of whom he gets along with better than his peers.  Ducky has a particular bond with...
• Sunny Winslow used to live up to her name, but her family is in the midst of a prolonged crisis. While Sunny’s mom battles lung cancer and her dad juggles both that and the renovation of the family business, Sunny feels both ignored and over-burdened, expected to pull  adult-sized weight at home.  Desperate for escape and attention, she indulges in irresponsible and often reckless behavior. 
• Maggie Blume, on the other hand, is the epitome of the tightly-wound overachiever, one whose obsession with being The Perfect Student, The Perfect Daughter, etc, drives her toward anorexia even as her mother is sinking into alcoholism. 
• Her best friend Amalia Vargas offers Maggie a little relief by helping her land a role as the lead singer in a garage band called VANISH, but Amalia has an abusive ex-boyfriend turned stalker.  
• First in the series, Dawn Schaefer is the 'centered' character, the one who is most conscious of the changes she and her friends are going through as old friends fall away and new ones are discovered. Her 'issue' seems fairly mundane at first -- she has a stepmother she's not comfortable with -- but her bond with Sunny's mother, combined with Sunny's increasing turmoil as she wrestles with fear and her mother's very-possible death,  cause a lot of turbulence between Dawn and Sunny as the series progresses. Dawn is also a link to a previous series under Martin's name, The Babysitters Club. 

Each character’s “handwriting” is rendered in unique fonts, and each have distinctive ways of writing -- Ducky writes his in the second-person perspective,  Amalia writes into her book as if she were talking to someone named “Nbook”,  and Maggie -- the perfectionist --  types hers, although readers still see her handwriting when she drafts and revises poems and song lyrics.  (She has  a line in the picture above, "I think the word is 'pretentious'".  Maggie isn’t the only one whose creative talents are part of the journal: Amalia is an aspiring graphic artist and often illustrates scenes from her life.    The series of fifteen books takes us through each person’s journals three times,  beginning with Dawn, ending with Ducky, and then wrapping around again.  (It’s not a bizarre coincidence that all five characters keep journals: their school requires it of students beginning in elementary classes.)  The above picture is unusual in that it puts several characters' handwriting in the same book:  Ducky is driving to the beach and the girls are scribbling their greetings in his notebook. Only Amalia is missing, because '72 Buicks only have so much room.  Each of the fifteen diaries covers roughly a month or so.


While I'll be reading the series this next week, I won't be doing reviews for the books in part because they're so little (100 pages each, or thereabouts), I may muse a bit at the end on how the story has aged.