Ben Van Heuvelen

I spent last Tuesday covering the first part of the Arab League summit, which was a meeting of economic ministers. The biggest events took place later in the week at the old Republican Palace; this one was at the Sheraton Hotel, which is right next to two landmarks of the Iraq War: Firdous Square, where Saddam’s iconic statue was pulled down in April 2003; and the Palestine Hotel, where many foreign journalists stayed during the invasion. I’ve posted a few pictures below.

I also wrote a dispatch for Foreign Policy about the Iraqi government’s $500 million effort to temporarily transform the capital into a city that could host a meeting of foreign dignitaries: online here. Enjoy!

I’ve taken a few good day trips over the past week or so.

One was a long walk around Martyr Sami Abdul Rahman park in Erbil. It’s a couple square miles, well kept, and located pretty near the center of town, but the people here don’t seem to know what to do with it. There are enormous playgrounds filled with see-saws and jungle gyms, big fields perfect for picnics, benches along a lakeside promenade — all empty. I probably saw a dozen people over the course of three hours. When I returned on a Friday for a run around the park, I saw maybe 30. I’m not sure whether to chalk this up to winter, or whether folks just haven’t figured out the joys of public space quite yet.

Another trip was a visit to the Erbil refinery. I took a 40-minute drive northwest of Erbil to the shores of the Zaab River, which was a dividing line between Kurdish and Saddam-controlled territory between 1991 and 2003. My guide pointed at some hills on the other side of the river and said, “Saddam’s tanks used to be there.” Somewhere along the same stretch of shore, Alexander the Great fought the Persians.

Then, a couple days ago I took a trip to the Khor Mor gas field. Kurdistan likes to boast that it has 22 hours of daily electricity service (compared with maybe 6 hours in other parts of Iraq), and much of the feedstock for this power comes from a single field. The good people of Dana Gas, the company extracting the gas, arranged for a driver to take me on the 3-hour journey — first down a very straight and flat stretch of desert highway to the northern outskirts of Kirkuk, then due east through some orange-brown country whose hilly topography reminded me of those sand-drip towers children make on the beach, except on a much larger scale.

I took some photos along the way, and have posted a few here.

Yesterday I took a taxi to the center of town to see Erbil’s main tourist attraction, the Citadel. People first started living there 7,000 years ago, just after humans figured out how to smelt copper. UNESCO says it’s the oldest continuously inhabited structure in the world. To keep this record alive perhaps, the government allows a single family to continue living there while it’s being restored. (I didn’t run into the family yesterday, but maybe I’ll try to find them.)

The Citadel was built on an artificial earthen mound that rises about 30 meters above the rest of Erbil and the surrounding flatlands. From the parapets, you can see the city, the suburbs, and the Zagros Mountains to the north. The inside of the Citadel is divided in half by a wide north-south road. On either side, there’s a hive-like maze of corridors, huts, and hollows. I was walking around the Citadel at 4pm on a Friday — the middle of the weekend — and once I stepped off the main road it was entirely quiet. I’ve never been somewhere so ancient that was so recently inhabited. There were shoes and blankets inside some of the huts. In one, a dilapidated motorcycle. Here and there, restoration workers had left behind cement mixers and other large pieces of construction equipment. I imagined that I was encountering the aftermath of an Indiana Jones adventure in which protective ghosts have chased some agents of modernity from an old and sacred place.

The surrounding city is developing quickly. Qalat Park, just south of the Citadel, sits between Erbil’s grand bazaar and a mosque that looks curiously like the British Parliament. The park has some of the trappings of a tacky public space — fountains illuminated by tri-colored LED lights, walkways set so close to the fountains that a gust of wind can drench you — but the overall setting is so beautiful that the design quirks become charming.

I took a bunch of photos, some of which I’ve posted below. You ought to be able to click on any one of them to enlarge. Enjoy!

The distance between capital and labor is on my mind these days. Last week I was biking through lower Manhattan and I heard the chanting of Occupy Wall Street protesters, who had just marched out of Zuccotti Park. As I rounded the corner I saw them walking in a thin line towards some common destination. I didn’t follow; I had somewhere else to be. But I do share some of their anxiety about capitalism. A world of material concern can erode your soul if you’re not careful.

I’m writing this from Istanbul, where I’ve been covering the “Iraq Mega Projects Conference” at the Ritz Carlton. The most prominent features on the published schedule are keynote lectures and panel discussions with Iraqi government and oil industry players. But the most important events are the “networking coffee” and “networking lunch” breaks. They’re like speed dating sessions for capitalists. You make eye contact with someone, you reach into your coat pocket, and you shake hands with your right while exchanging business cards with your left. Your overt goal is to find out how this person can help you, and vice versa. State your business and they state theirs. Ask a few smart questions that show you know what’s up. At the end of the conversation, maybe scribble down a thumbnail description on the back of their business card so that you can file them in the right part of your contact list. Each person is interesting to the extent that he is useful.

This activity is arguably vital to the future of Iraq. I’ve traveled from Baghdad to Basra and can vouch that things are in a terrible state. Iraq needs schools, hospitals, housing, roads, and electricity — the very basics. Most discouraging of all, the country lacks what development economists and diplomats euphemistically call “capacity.” In other words, many government officials are not very competent. This is perhaps true in all countries, but after decades of war and dictatorship the problem is partiuclarly acute in Iraq because such a high proportion of well educated Iraqis have emigrated. Looking at these realities, you don’t have to be a free-market fundamentalist to believe that Iraq’s success depends on some help from foreign, private investment. And how does capital find its way into Iraq? Two men in an Istanbul luxury hotel exchange business cards.

With these thoughts in mind, I walked from a networking coffee break over to a conference room to hear a lecture by the Senior Vice President for Solutions of a private security company. His presentation turned out to be a PowerPoint marketing pitch. I began to tune out, scribbling a few notes merely out of habit. But then I reflected on my notebook, where I had recorded his company’s menu of services:

– Biometrics
– Asset tracking: where your employees are; how they are behaving
– Linear asset surveillence
– Covert unattended ground sensors
– Fiber optic intrustion detection
– Ground surveillance radar: detects people at 12 km
– Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs): for use where no radar is possible; vehicle software tracks targets automatically
– Securing intellectual assets: like big-game hunting & “we are the animals in this process”

These are exactly the services I’d expect a security company to provide. But on another level, the menu gave a remarkably candid view of how Iraq looks through the eyes of foreign capitalists. Neighbors become “targets” to be tracked and employees become “assets” to be scanned and surveilled. Trust no one.

These fears are justified, of course. A foreign company in Iraq would be foolish not to anticipate violence, theft, and corruption. And there’s the rub. If they are wise to suspect that almost anyone might want to steal from them or blow them up, then this strikes me as a prime indicator that the situation is totally fucked up.

If we are looking for someone to blame for this mess, then let us start with Saddam Hussein and proceed to the disastrous incompetence of the early American occupation. I wouldn’t even begin to suggest that foreign companies are responsible for Iraq’s problems. But looking at the country through a private security contractor’s eyes gave me pause. It punctured the noble rhetoric of economic development that tends to buoy these investment conferences.

The investors basically say: sure we’re making a buck, but we’re also boosting Iraq’s standard of living. A rising tide lifts all boats. If you’re a little queasy about the aesthetics of the enterprise — the whiff of war profiteering, the soupcon of western condescension — then your bleeding heart should be considerably more troubled by the alternatives. This is how the world works. To be idealistic in the face of suffering without any concern for pragmatic solutions is to be sentimental rather than compassionate.

On each of these individual points, they are right. But in order to combine those points into an argument for a free-market investment bonanza, they have to ignore a lot of other relevant evidence. One way to bring the rest of the picture into focus is to look at a capitalist looking at Iraq through the window of an armored SUV. How much good can he possibly be doing for people he regards as threats, targets and, at best, assets? At this level of remove, investors and political leaders alike can point to something like GDP growth and mistake it for progress.

Thoughtful development economists, on the other hand, have tried to see how an oil boom looks to an average person. The statistics that come closer to measuring their quality of life are things like unemployment rates and median incomes. Those numbers tell a different story. They reveal that a massive influx of revenue can actually harm a country’s economy and governance. To wit: an oil sector might earn a hundred billion dollars, but it also employs only a tiny fraction of the population, removes any revenue incentive for the government to develop the rest of its economy, and for many reasons makes it harder to create jobs that rely on exporting anything other than oil. The rich get really rich; the poor, to the extent their lives get better, depend on the largesse of the rich.

This is a boilerplate summary of what is commonly called the “resource curse.” I’m not going to take this line of thought too much further, because I would need more than a blog post to explore with any intelligence whether the resource curse is an inevitable result of capitalism plus oil.

My smaller thought is about why powerful people routinely fail to understand the resource curse. At investment conferences you often hear someone utter the phrase “turn the curse of oil into a blessing” — they have heard of the problem — but they offer solutions in the form of corporate social responsibility projects that use a sliver of oil revenues to build schools and hospitals; they are not addressing a macroeconomic phenomenon that indicts the structure of their industry. This blinkered view is not just a product of self-interest. Much of the time, people with very good intentions are simply failing to see the world through the eyes of the people they’re nominally helping. They lack empathy. After all, effective capitalists see things — including one another — in terms of risk and utility.

Such an attitude is unquestionably useful, especially in a violent place. But I wonder if it can play any role in making a place less violent. I am reminded of a time when I got in line behind an armed private security contractor in a coffee shop on a military base in Basra: looking up, I saw an enormous patch sewn onto the back of his flak jacket that said in English and Arabic, “STAY BACK 100 METERS OR YOU WILL BE SHOT.” This practical advice is meant to prevent misunderstandings and save lives. But even though I was pretty sure the message didn’t apply to me, I found myself taking it personally. “What an asshole,” I thought. I could only imagine how an Iraqi would feel! I could also imagine the dirty look this hired gun would get from an Iraqi. And how that look might bring his hand to his sidearm. And so on, until they both start seeing each other as targets.

…

Update 11/19/11: I just came across this article from 2005, “The Ethical Economist,” by Joseph Stiglitz. It’s a review of Benjamin Friedman’s book The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth, which spurred a pretty interesting public discussion among economists who are critiquing both free-market fundamentalism and anti-growth populism. They aren’t writing directly about the resource curse, but they do talk about similar themes of growth that helps people vs. growth that is unmoored from non-economic ethical commitments.

At dinner on Tuesday night two friends were reveling in their recent trip to the Museum of Modern Art, raving about de Kooning. I loved their enthusiasm, but I couldn’t quite relate. I’ve never been moved by de Kooning.

Visual art penetrates my consciousness even more rarely and capriciously than music does. I can listen to a song for years and not even register the lyrics. Then one day I’ll be driving in the car with an album playing and realize not only that I know all of the words, but also that they are describing the contours of my soul. About a decade ago, for example, I was listening to Bob Dylan sing “Mama You Been On My Mind” —

Perhaps it’s the color of the sun caught flat
And covering the crossroads I’m standing at
Or maybe it’s the weather
Or something like that
But mama you been on my mind.

— when all of a sudden I realized that he was in that state of new love in which you are so taken with a girl that everything reminds you of her, but you’re playing it cool because you’d seem obsessive if you showed your feelings, even though you’re secretly hoping that she would find your manic enthusiasm flattering and endearing, and might even reciprocate it. At the time I made this realization, I was in such a state myself. I was ready to hear the song.

The last time I was in MOMA, I looked at almost the entire collection but didn’t really see anything. I walked past de Kooning without pause. I probably just wasn’t ready. But then I came upon Oskar Kokoschka’s “Hans Tietze and Erica Tietze-Conrat,” a marriage portrait that the eponymous couple commissioned in 1909. I stood there and stared for what felt like an hour.

The reproduced image here fails to convey the painting. The scratches of the artist’s fingernails and the excess daubs of paint and the intensity of some colors and the dullness of others somehow combine to evoke a combination of intimacy and anxiety. I could imagine their conversations: every time they decide to reveal something to each other, they also withhold something greater.

This type of interior tension between two people is almost impossible to express with a just measure of beauty. I have seen dancers achieve it. In writing, the grand master is D. H. Lawrence. Here is a passage from The Rainbow, describing an early scene in Tom Brangwen’s courtship of a Polish widow, whom he’ll eventually marry:

Sometimes her vagueness, in which he was lost, made him angry, made him rage. But he held himself still as yet. She had no response, no being towards him. It puzzled and enraged him, but he submitted for a long time. Then, from the accumulated troubling of her ignoring him, gradually a fury broke out, destructive, and he wanted to go away, to escape her.

It happened she came down to the Marsh with the child whilst he was in this state. Then he stood over against her, strong and heavy in his revolt, and though he said nothing, still she felt his anger and heavy impatience grip hold of her, she was shaken again as out of a torpor. Again her heart stirred with a quick, out-running impulse, she looked at him, at the stranger who was not a gentleman yet who insisted on coming into her life, and the pain of a new birth in herself strung all her veins to a new form. She would have to begin again, to find a new being, a new form, to resopnd to that blind, insistent figure standing over her.

We are all so much weirder than we pretend we are! That is the lesson that leaps forth from almost every page Lawrence writes. Civilization has rendered us civil, but beneath our composed exteriors is a teeming fount of uncatalogued feeling that only great writers sometimes name. Words usually fail. I had tried to describe the Kokoschka portrait to my friend the de Kooning enthusiast over dinner, and then helplessly sent her a JPEG image the next day. Wisely, she responded merely with a hyperlink to an image of another painting:

Just so!

I thought immediately of a painting by an artist named Motke Blum, a Romanian by birth who now lives in Israel. When I was visiting Jerusalem, I wandered into a touristy artists’ colony just outside the old city, expecting to buy a kitschy drawing of the Western Wall that I could give a friend. Motke does make such drawings, which were displayed along one wall. But the rest of his studio was stacked and hung with hundreds of paintings, all of them seemingly united in the faith that their primary subject — light — has the power to reveal the essence of things. I sent an image of one painting to my friend.

“They are definitely speaking to each other,” my friend responded. I assume she was referring to the two paintings. And the beauty of their conversation is especially sharp because, though I’ve so far failed to translate it into words, I can still hear it.

In the Hoyt-Schermerhorn subway station in Brooklyn this afternoon, a very handsome boy in his late teens or early twenties was leaning back against an iron beam next to the tracks. He was dressed fashionably, in an army-green jacket with red chevrons on the shoulders and skinny navy-blue jeans that rode below his hips. Like a model in a fashion spread, he looked world-weary and sophisticated, until I imagined him in the age-appropriate clothing of normal teenage style, at which point he just looked bored. In fact, he seemed to be falling asleep. His eyes were closed and his head would loll and occasionally jolt, in the motion of an involuntary nap. I found an iron beam of my own to lean against and began to read.

When I looked up from my book, he was crossing the platform towards me. Something was wrong. His head was still pitched slightly backward, and his eyelids were mostly closed, one slit just wider than the other. His arms hung limply at his sides. Each time his foot struck the ground he would pause, as if to secure his balance and calibrate the distance of his next stride. I assume he was on heroin. The vacant stare, the zombie gait, the high sloping cheekbones and soft, pale complexion — I felt repulsed. I thought of the uncanny valley, a term in robotics that describes the sense of revulsion people feel towards very close yet imperfect facsimiles of humans.

Step by step he approached. There were train tracks at my back, and I wondered — in a moment that pitted self-preservation against modest heroics — whether I should step aside and let him pass to the ledge or stand in his way. Four paces away, three, two. I stood. At the last moment, he veered sideways and plodded back towards the other side of the platform.

I looked around as you do when something strange happens and you want an empathetic nod from a fellow stranger. There were a hundred people or more within view, but most hadn’t seen the boy, or had pretended not to see. One woman, blond, in a business suit, in her forties, craned her neck around me and watched, with a look of both consternation and concern, as the boy, now ten paces away from us, walked right up to the ledge of the Queens-bound G track.

A voice on the loudspeaker said, “There is a Queens-bound G train approaching the station.”

It’s amazing how many things you can think about at once in a moment of crisis. I noticed the cigarette behind the boy’s right ear. I wondered whether this might be a piece of performance art. I recalled a New Year’s Eve in Venice when, standing on a water taxi platform, I watched an old man in a tuxedo fall into the Canal Grande and, as I stood inertly thinking that I should jump in after him, some men reached belly- down over the ledge, grabbed his arm, and pulled him from the water. I told myself I should not intervene here, since if this boy should jump, then he had chosen his fate, and if he should fall, he had earned it. Then I reprimanded myself, telling myself that this boy was dear to someone — a mother, a little brother — even if he was not dear to himself. Then I reminded myself that if anyone living in such a city as New York were to imagine the texture of every other life he encountered, his heart would crack. A dozen more thoughts, too, as the boy swayed unsteadily and caught himself with a stiff shuffle.

A rumbling of wheels and a screech of old metal announced the arrival of a train into the station. It was the C train, on the other track behind me, arriving ahead of the fateful G. I felt my body loosen with relief. Either line would take me home.

The best rock’n’roll show I’ve ever attended was played on the second floor of a little venue in the East Village called Mo Pitkins, by a band called the Shivers. There were six people in the Shivers at the time, and about twice as many in the audience. The band was on point. In one song, a waltz named after a stretch of traffic-clogged highway in Queens (“L.I.E.”), the players stuck so tight to the drummer’s slow beat that the song, rather than seeming downtempo, created a small universe where time just moved at a more contemplative pace.

The lead singer, Keith Zarriello, has a soulful and expressive voice with excellent range and pitch. He’s as strong in trembling low vibrato as when he’s belting a scratchy tenor or crooning in falsetto. As a lyricist, he can be brilliant. “I’m gettin’ to know you, girl,” he sings in “L.I.E.” “I’ve seen you with your glasses on / I’ve seen you in your daddy’s arms / and I’ve seen you drive a car.” I defy anyone to write three clauses that better express the feeling in a romance when the charge of attraction first locks into bonded familiarity.

On stage, Keith seems shy. He wears large dark sunglasses and his microphone banter between songs consists mostly of half-mumbled observations to himself. When a song begins, though, he performs with great intensity, almost despite himself, as though the man on stage is only a half-willing conduit for the persona of the singer, like Whoopi Goldberg letting Patrick Swayze possess her in “Ghost.” As my friend Ryan said, “You can tell he’s doing it” — being a musician in New York — “because he has to.”

What little I know of Keith suggests he’s an odd guy. He’s a sworn anti-sexual, a conspiracy theorist, and a New York City real estate broker. His eccentric commitments appear in his songs to varying degrees, and they’re most obvious in my least favorite numbers; on one Shivers album, for example, a track titled “Inside Job” consists of 9 minutes and 11 seconds of silence. In other songs, though, Keith’s sense of division — he’s both a man with everyday problems and a seer grasping some hidden current of life — makes for great blues-punk poetry. “Everyone here wants to shave their head,” he sings, “but I wanna shave my brain.”

Yesterday I received a package from the Shivers. I had ordered Keith’s new solo album with a PayPal donation via the Shivers’ web site, trusting, in the spirit of internet commerce, that my gift into the virtual ether would reach a person of good faith. That person, I assume, was Keith himself, and he took great care in making up the return package. Inside the manila mailing envelope, Keith’s album was wrapped inside two sheets of the New York Post. The outer layer was folded such that across the face of the CD case was a large photo of a Tiger Woods mistress, bearing her cleavage. The inner layer was a photo of Greg Monroe, a power forward for the Georgetown Hoyas, holding his forehead after an upset loss in the first round of the NCAA tournament.

I don’t see any profound meaning here, just a couple of images thrown into funny contrast, an aesthete’s little joke. I think it was Keith’s way of saying thanks for being a fan.

I was grateful for his gesture; I think he knew I’d feel a little starstruck. In a song called “Half Invisible,” Keith sings, “Sometimes I walk the streets / no one sees me. / Other days, people think / I’m a movie star.” In this digital age, of course, someone can be both a guy with a day job and a musician who — for a certain internet-connected niche audience — resides in the pantheon of iTunes most-played playlists alongside Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, and Lou Reed. How cool is that?

Every now and then, a high school ultimate frisbee team will ask me to come out and run a clinic for them. I teach some fundamentals, run them through drills, watch them scrimmage, and give them some basic ideas about how to keep improving. Last weekend I drove sixty miles north of Brooklyn to Cross River, NY, where about 30 kids at John Jay High School play together on a team that calls itself “Air Raid.”

Off Exit 6 of I-684, the road winds through woods, past long driveways and tasteful, large houses with stone fences bounding their acreage. Cross River is a wealthy town of Metro North commuters. Their children, the members of Air Raid, showed up at the fields one by one, driving their parents’ SUVs, minivans, and late-‘90s-era hand-me- down Mercedes sedans. The clinic was to start at 10; half of the team had arrived by 10:30.

All teenagers are hilarious in some way, when you get to know them. Teenage ultimate players tend to wear their quirkiness especially close to the surface. In a catching drill, one boy named Anton dove for an errant pass, missed it, and skidded awkwardly onto the ground; rather than stand up in a conventional way, he let his momentum carry him into a backward summersault, head-first through a puddle, and up onto his feet. Anton leaped to his feet, screaming. His hair was caked with icy mud, his sweatshirt soaked. Many of his teammates literally fell to the ground laughing as Anton ripped off his shirt and sprinted to the sidelines to change into dry clothes.

Later in the morning, I began confusing two boys named Kyle and Ryan — probably because both names have four letters and a “y.” Standing in the middle of a huddle, asking for a volunteer to help demonstrate the finer points of throwing, I called Ryan “Kyle” for the third or fourth time.

Exasperated, Ryan said, “You can remember I’m Ryan because I have one eye. Like, ‘Ryan with One Eye.’”

Experienced educators will recognize this immediately as the kind of bait that kids will occasionally throw out for authority figures, in an attempt to trick us into abandoning our focus. I was once a teacher. The correct way to respond to Ryan’s comment was to ignore it. Yet my authority-figure muscles have atrophied over the past few years, and Ryan’s comment was delightfully absurd. He appeared to have two eyes, and even if one was fake, how would that help me remember his name? He could just as easily be Kyle with One Eye.

“Really?” I said. “It’s true!” his teammates said. “Pop it out, Ryan!”

Ryan seemed to consider it, but looked distressed. I thought he was offended at being treated like a circus freak.

“Guys, I can’t,” he said. “My hands are dirty.” It was a matter of hygiene.

Ryan’s teammates continued to goad him, and rather than corral the group back into focus, I found myself daydreaming about having one eye. Beyond the lack of depth perception, the limited peripheral vision, the inconvenience of extracting and cleaning your glass eye every night — how would you break that fact to a new girlfriend? — I pondered the unappreciated comfort of having body parts in pairs. Eyes, ears, hands, kidneys. The worst part of having only one eye, I decided, would be that you’d feel at least twice as vulnerable to the threat of being blinded. We two-eyed people don’t often have occasion to ponder what blindness would be like. But I bet Ryan does. Subtly, subconsciously, he has probably learned to look longer and remember better whenever he encounters something beautiful.

I snapped out of my daydream. In a matter of seven seconds, a normal and predictable frisbee-throwing lesson had turned into absurdity. I felt fully complicit. Having indulged my daydream, I had lost the moral standing to correct their lack of focus with any indignation of my own. Instead, I could only smile at them conspiratorially, an authority figure silently acknowledging what all teenagers suspect, and occasionally charm or cajole adults into revealing: that power is a fiat currency, that adulthood is largely make-believe, and that the value of rules sometimes lies in the joy of ignoring them.

Scientists have discovered evidence that could reveal the coloring of some dinosaurs.

From one perspective, on the scale of possible scientific breakthroughs – from the development of vaccines to knowledge of the origins of the universe – this discovery scores pretty low. From another perspective – that of the little kid in all of us, whose imagination was once excited by the image of giant, terrifying creatures – it seems like a small miracle. Paleontology is amazing. Didn’t you ever wonder how anyone could possibly take an arrangement of bones and, with any confidence, create a vivid rendering of a roaring Tyrannosaurus Rex? As children, I think we loved dinosaur pictures not just because we could imagine the terrible power of the T-Rex’s jaws, but also because science and art, magically combined, seemed to be allowing us to travel through time.

I’ve always assumed that the best scientists must retain something like this kind of wonder at the world. On that note, here is a passage from the Times article, which explains the origins of the dinosaur-coloring breakthrough:

In the new study, Michael Benton, a paleontologist at the University of Bristol, and colleagues have analyzed the structures of what appear to be feathers and say they match the feathers of living birds down to the microscopic level. They used microscopic features to determine the ancient feathers’ color. The study builds on earlier work on fossil bird feathers by Jakob Vinther, a graduate student at Yale, and his colleagues. In 2006, Mr. Vinther discovered what looked like an ink sac preserved in a squid fossil. Putting the fossil under a microscope, he discovered the sac was filled with tiny spheres. The spheres were identical to pigment-loaded structures in squid ink, known as melanosomes.

Mr. Vinther knew that melanosomes created colors in other animals, including bird’s feathers. He and his colleagues made a microscopic inspection of fossils of feathers from extinct birds. They discovered melanosomes with the same sausage- shaped structure as those found in living birds. By analyzing the shape and arrangement of the fossil melanosomes, they were able to get clues to their original color. They determined, for example, that a 47-million-year-old feather had the dark iridescent sheen found on starlings today.

Dr. Benton was intrigued when he read Mr. Vinther’s research and immediately wondered what it might mean for dinosaurs.

I imagine Dr. Benton, weary from his day’s tasks – writing grant applications, peer- reviewing journal articles, meeting with graduate students, planning his portion of an upcoming paleontology conference. His eyes have begun drying and tightening with fatigue. On his desk, amid the piles of papers, lies an article by a graduate student at Yale on ancient feathers. The article received some attention – it warranted an article in the Science section of the New York Times last year – but it’s one of three dozen studies that Dr. Benton knows he “should” read. He wipes off his glasses, picks up the article, and begins to skim, almost looking for a reason to conclude that he can stop without feeling any guilt. But he reads a bit longer, and as his mind releases from the surrounding world of practical concern, his thoughts become fluid. There is space for inspiration. With child-like literalness, he immediately wonders what this might mean for dinosaurs.