The first decade of the 20th century was a sparkling time in American construction. Nowhere was its spirit more intense than in downtown New York, an aging colonial seaport that was fast becoming a center of industrial capitalism. Here, among winding narrow blocks, a Whitmanesque neighborhood of brick row houses and Protestant steeples was rapidly evolving into a concrete labyrinth of elegant white towers and steam-damp canyons. New York, with each new spire, signaled that America would no longer defer to Europe. Now, the future was being charted on this side of the Atlantic.
The Singer Building was an icon of this moment. Rising 612 feet above Broadway (at the corner of Liberty Street) its sheer ambition was proved by a fleeting reign as the world’s tallest building. Its artfulness was established by use of neoclassical and Renaissance design elements at a novel scale. And its authenticity was grounded in local industry: Manhattan then was a maze of textiles. Its industrial fabric comprised cloth workshops and showrooms, its tenements housed armies of piece workers and seamstresses, and its labor unions were dominated by needle-trades employees. For the city’s skyline to be topped off by a maker of industrial sewing machines was a perfect fit.
Whale falls may occur as frequently as every ten miles on the seafloor; at any given time, there are likely hundreds of thousands of them around the world. A 2015 review paper by the deep-sea ecologist Craig Smith, at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, and a number of collaborators proposed that decaying whale carcasses may serve “as a sort of biodiversity generator,” allowing organisms from different energy-rich seafloor oases, such as thermal vents or methane seeps, to mingle. The importance of these deep-sea ecosystems makes whale falls especially fascinating. Seafloor microbes consume methane, which is a greenhouse gas, and provide biomass that ultimately sustains fish populations. Rouse’s team is monitoring a number of habitats around Rosebud to understand how they’re connected, and how deep-sea oases like whale falls and seeps might drive evolution.
There are creatures that have been observed at whale falls and nowhere else. Osedax are among them. Shana Goffredi, a biologist at Occidental College, was part of the team that first analyzed the Osedax worm in detail, at a whale fall in Monterey Canyon, around four hundred miles northwest of San Diego. Since then, she has led several research projects to piece together the worm’s genetic heritage and bizarre way of life. The first scavengers at a whale fall feast on the flesh. “Anything could take advantage of that,” Goffredi told me, dismissively. Osedax—Latin for “bone-eater”—“are specifically relying on bone, which is a weird, weird thing to eat.”
Haberman runs a successful marketing agency that bears his name, which has worked with foodie clients like Annie’s Homegrown, Earthbound Farm, and Organic Valley, along with Prana, Volvo, and LeafLine Labs, a medical-cannabis outfit that manufacturers pharmaceutical-grade THC and CBD extracts. He launched Urban Organics in 2011 with three friends and a plan, among other things, to create the world’s largest organic aquaponics farm. Aquaponics combines hydroponics—growing plants without soil in a water-based mineral solution—with aquaculture, otherwise known as fish farming. Poop-laden wastewater from the fish is pumped into the plant beds, where roots suck up the nutrients and help purify the sullied water before it’s recirculated back to the aquaculture tanks.
An early form of aquaponics was developed by the Toltecs, who created artificial islands (called chinampas) to grow crops on lakes. More recently, maker types have been getting into it, cobbling together smallish home setups. But the Urban Organics operation is massive. This became obvious when Haberman stopped talking about his SUV and prodded me through the front door of the Schmidt building and into the warehouse.
When i left academia for the so-called “real world,” the first job I landed was at a restaurant consulting agency. Naïvely, I thought I knew a thing or two about food. Hadn’t all those years studying orgiastic turtle feasting rituals meant anything? Working at the agency changed all of that. I learned to think of burgers in terms of “carriers” and “proteins” and fries in terms of their “craveability.” Restaurants were never mere restaurants; they were “fast casuals” or “fine casuals” or yet-to-be-named service models devoted to customizing bowls of poke. I made PowerPoint presentations exhorting clients to “leverage equity in sauces and dips” and “showcase fork and knife credibility.”
But nothing riles up a restaurant consultant quite like menus. Whether they’re printed on laminated cards, scrawled on vintage chalkboards, broadcast on LED screens, or recited by earnest waiters, menus instruct us how to use a restaurant. Little is left to chance. Stack your menu with too many options, and you’ll rattle your guests with order anxiety. Refuse to indulge their fickle appetites, and your user frequency will take a hit.
Two new books on the value of invisibility and silence seem like a clever bit of counterprogramming. Coming upon them was like finding the Advil bottle in the medicine cabinet after stumbling about with a headache for a long time. They are both, perhaps purposefully, slow reads. They demand patience from addled minds primed to see such subject matter as a result of subtraction, the blank pages between chapters.
For all that the main characters are men, the gaze that encounters several different, vivacious female characters is an awed and loving one, and conversations about gender feel grounded in character and richly effective. The work women are doing together to obtain suffrage is deeply felt and wonderful, and I was frequently overwhelmed by how much joy the reading was bringing me.
Louis sacrifices some of the nuance of his first novel for a more bludgeoning polemical directness. The result, even so, speaks with an emotional authenticity and a stylistic confidence that is hard to ignore.