SPORTS STARS
New Yorker
With the bowl games at hand, the N.B.A. and N.H.L. seasons in full flow, the N.F.L. playoffs just ahead, and pitchers-and-catchers a bare six weeks away, sports fans may be wondering once again why all this repletion isn’t more satisfying. Sports news abounds, with the talk shows easily outnumbering the games actually being played, but what’s missing still is the crazy, cozy old sense of identification that once tied the fan by the set or in the stands to the young athletes out on the field. The attachment was steady until a couple of decades ago, and what did it in wasn’t so much salaries or steroids or free agency as the astoundingly changed dimensions and reflexes of the modern player. Professional athletes once looked like somebody we knew, that friendly young fellow down the block who could run fast and dunk the ball or throw it a mile—not us exactly but close enough, and there in the games to represent if not always our town or our college then our species. This illusion waned when everyday N.B.A. players grew to six feet eight or better and N.F.L. linemen suddenly averaged two hundred and ninety pounds and could run forty yards in under six seconds. Well, O.K., there was still baseball, where the sweet connection first flourished. Our fathers or grandfathers, at ease in their good grandstand seats behind third base, could look out at Red Schoendienst or Bill Mazeroski or Tom Tresh and think, Well, with a little luck . . . The regulars took home each year just about what a pediatrician or a V.P. for sales or a steady C.P.A. earned. They were us, if we were doing well, in short, and chances were that we’d have succeeded at their game, too, if we’d taken a crack at it. Well, dream on, Gramps—or, as Hemingway’s Jake Barnes said, isn’t it pretty to think so? Now, in any case, all that’s gone. Try to get down near field level before your next ballgame and take a look at Derek Jeter or Jeff Kent or Dontrelle Willis as they stroll by: wow, these guys are enormous.
The dream of intimacy—it was always fantasy—is gone, and today’s players, so close to us on our plasma screens, are galaxies away from our own doings and capabilities. The loss hurts—no wonder the hosts and guests on the TV sports shows look so angry—and we are casting about to close the distance. If we can bring ourselves to think of professional athletes as rock stars, which they so resemble, we can find them on the wildly popular MTV program “Cribs,” which has taken viewers to the lush quarters of Snoop Dogg and Mariah Carey and Missy Elliott (a giant replica of her signature is set in the floor of her front hall), and also to Johnny Damon’s home in Tampa, where the dining room features an altered version of “The Last Supper,” with the heads of former fellow Red Sox players replacing the Apostles around the table. On various Web sites, we can also find Shaquille O’Neal’s lobby-size bed with its Superman-logo bedspread, and the heroic bronze statue of Pudge Rodriguez that decorates his own back yard. Roger Clemens, who has yet to appear on “Cribs,” has granted the occasional journalist a visit to his fifteen-thousand-square-foot home in the Piney Point area of Houston, with its Hall of Bats; its floor-to-ceiling golf-ball holders on either side of his study desk, containing three hundred and four golf balls each (one for each course he has played to date); and a bedroom that features lighted display cases and a wet bar. Gasping at the stars’ enormous pads and rolling acres and their outsized fridges (empty, for the most part, except for the obligatory bottle of Cristal) and snickering at such monumental garishness and infantile taste is all right for the sub-twenty age group that “Cribs” aims at, but it’s still not what we fans are after. What we yearn for may be contained in the question that every sportswriter keeps hearing from his readers: “What’s Willie Mays”—or Phil Mickelson or Andy Roddick—“really like?” Willie, as it happens, is cranky and private in person (he’s seventy-four years old) and passably complex, but this news, of course, is not what’s wanted. The desired, almost the demanded, answer is that he’s a great guy: he’s exactly like us.
The Times, on a recent Saturday, featured an extended visit to the New York apartment of Tiki Barber, now in his ninth year as the featured running back for the New York Giants. Barber, a known sports good guy, is thirty and on the edge of superstardom, and here he was, with that shaved head and sweet smile, at play with his twenty-one-month-old son, Chason, and then with his feet up on an ottoman, gabbing with his animated wife, Ginny. Their four-thousand-square-foot apartment has a twelve-foot-high trophy case, a flat-screen TV in every room, and space for a private suite for Ginny’s parents, but in the story it felt modest enough to allow a sports-fan reader to feel right at home, even familiar. Nice place, Tiki, but this striped, nail-head bench—what were you thinking? And that bedroom for Chason’s three-year-old brother, A.J.—do you want a kid growing toward his teens staring at a mural every day where he’s holding up a sign that says “Go Tiki #21!” C’mon!
This sense of wry palship, a Schadenfreude dekorative, lasted for local fans right up until kickoff time, late that same afternoon, when Tiki Barber and the Giants took on the visiting Kansas City Chiefs at the Meadowlands, and beat them, 27–17, to put themselves one game away from clinching the National Football Conference East division. There was plenty of Tiki to watch and yell over. He is midsized and not particularly fast as running backs go, but here he was, again cruising close to his blockers and then finding the hole or the invisible seam and driving for yardage before disappearing under a vanload of tacklers. The Giants scored a couple of field goals and a touchdown on a pass from Eli Manning to Amani Toomer, but the play of the day was a second-quarter run by Tiki, around the left side and then brilliantly back and forth between grasping and flying frustrated Chief defensemen, forty-one yards, for a touchdown. He ran some more after that, driving in for the twenty-yard clinching touchdown late in the day—it was night by now, and you kept your eye on his gleaming blue helmet in motion, always a little lower than the rest. In the end, he’d run two hundred and twenty yards from scrimmage—and away from us, you might say—for a franchise record, and had compiled 1,577 rushing yards for the season, breaking the team record he set last year. Great game, Tiki. Out of sight.
MOVIES
MATCH POINT
New Yorker
You could say that Woody Allen, by shifting his milieu from New York’s Upper East Side to London’s elegant Belgravia, has not so much re-invented himself (as some have suggested) as gone back to the motherland of the Wasp good taste he’s always aspired to. But there’s no need to be rude. Whatever Allen’s needs or motives, a change of light and scenery was obviously good for him. His new movie, “Match Point,” devoted to lust, adultery, and murder, is the most vigorous thing he’s done in years. The beginning, however, is lame: we’re introduced to an Irish-born tennis pro, Chris Wilton (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), a very good player—he played Andre Agassi a couple of times—who is now teaching at a posh London club, where he meets Tom Hewett (Matthew Goode), the lanky, easygoing son of a wealthy family. Tom takes a shine to Chris, who comes from a poor background but has upwardly mobile tastes—he loves opera—and introduces him to his friends and relatives, including his sister, Chloe (Emily Mortimer). In the family box at Covent Garden, Chloe keeps shifting her gaze from “La Traviata” to the handsome young tennis player sitting behind her. Chris’s visit to the Hewett country estate follows soon after.
The trouble with these scenes is that they feel falsely debonair. The twitty rhythms and studied languor of Tom’s idiom (“I’ve got some serious cocktails to start making”) and the good-hearted effusions of Chloe, who is described as “frighteningly bright” but comes off as vapid, sound more like the small talk in a drawing-room comedy from 1956 than like the London of today. And, at first, Allen’s dramatic construction is more opportunistic than convincing: Chloe falls instantly and irreversibly in love with Chris, and her father (Brian Cox), some sort of corporate tycoon, takes Chris into his business without any hesitation. Can the English upper class really be this unguarded? At the firm, Chris rises like a moon shot, though we never find out what the business does or what he does, except dress beautifully, get driven around town in a company Jag, and talk on the phone. The movie is framed by a philosophical meditation on the importance of luck, but it’s Allen’s script, not luck, that sends Chris so rapidly into the stratosphere.
In these early glimpses of the Hewett circle, there’s another guest—Nola Rice (Scarlett Johansson), a young American actress of no particular talent but overwhelming allure, who is Tom’s fiancée. Nola and Chris impudently flirt when they first meet; later, they bump into each other on the street and go to a bar, and, at that moment, the movie takes off. The two great-looking outsiders are perfectly matched. The slender Irish actor Jonathan Rhys Meyers (from “Bend It Like Beckham”) has widely spaced blue eyes, slightly flaring nostrils, and a flattened upper lip—he can look pensive or brutally calculating at will. Chris, as Rhys Meyers plays him, has perfect manners joined to rather frightening sang-froid. He’s avid, as Tony Curtis used to say—avid for love, for money, for everything—and he doesn’t care who notices it. Scarlett Johansson wears her blond hair up, which brings out the oval shape of her face and the soft beauty of her features, and she, too, has an unusual upper lip, curved and fleshy, and a low, smoky voice. Allen cuts back and forth between closeups of these two; the technique couldn’t be more straightforward, but it’s richly suggestive. Nola is lost and hanging on to Tom—she has the neurotic vulnerability that has always appealed to Allen, though she’s more openly sexual than his past heroines. She views Chris with amusement as a successful interloper, and advises him not to blow it by making a pass. But he sees her as a prize that is just as available to him as to Tom. He marries the chattering heiress Chloe, but he pursues Nola, and the mutual fascination that was so powerful in the bar feeds into the most passionate and explicitly erotic love scenes that Allen has ever directed. Despite all the complaints about sex in the movies, there isn’t that much of it, and almost none that is convincing. In this movie, lust carries everything before it—at least for a while. We are warned of trouble ahead by the music that Allen has chosen to accompany the love scenes—Enrico Caruso, at his most tender and ardent, singing arias from Italian opera, the genre of art that insists that sexual passion leads to violence.
The small talk drops away, the emotional temperature rises, and the directness and speed of the movie now feel right. And a certain cruelty, which has always been lodged in the underside of Allen’s sense of character, comes out. Given the stakes in money and power, that feels right, too. Chloe wants a child, and turns herself into a fertility laboratory—consulting doctors and setting hours for Chris to make love to her. But he’s already bored, and when Nola, whom he loves, gets pregnant, he has got one woman too many on his hands. In outline, the situation resembles that of Dreiser’s “An American Tragedy” (and its movie version, “A Place in the Sun”), in which a poor boy irresistibly drawn to a rich girl and all the pleasant luxuries that come with her manages to get his impoverished girlfriend pregnant. The issue for Chris comes down to this: what’s more important, love or money?
The way he “solves” his problem—by murdering one of the women— seems to have struck a number of the movie’s early viewers as unbelievable. After all, they say, this is modern life, and these things can be worked out. But intelligent people do occasionally commit murder, and not just in fictions concocted by Patricia Highsmith or P. D. James. If “Match Point” gives offense, the real reason, I suspect, is not that it’s implausible but that it forces us into complicity with a killer. Filmmakers understand the laws of narrative all too well: an audience, properly hooked by point-of-view shooting, will root for a bank robber or a murderer to get away with whatever he’s doing. Chris Wilton lies to everyone, grows more and more desperate, and, as he plans and pulls off a terrible crime, we are with him at every step. In the end, Allen returns to the role of luck and to an old obsession from “Crimes and Misdemeanors”—the question of whether there is any justice in the universe. But the abstract talk is just window dressing. “Match Point” is, at its core, the latest version of a story that has served as a bedrock of fiction for almost two hundred years: a young man from the provinces storms the big city with boldness and sexual charm and then gets in trouble. And we’re left, as always, identifying with his desire and regretting its consequences—which means, willy-nilly, chastening our own desire, too.
Can You Revive an Extinct Animal? By D.T. MAX
NY Times
Reinhold Rau is one of the last of his breed. He was once part of a team of seven taxidermists who, during the apartheid years in South Africa, mounted mammals and birds for the natural-history museum in Cape Town. You can still see his work there. The leopard moving toward its prey on the third floor is Rau's creation, as is the zebra fawn in a nearby glass case, taking shelter under an adult. Rau loves his work - the stripping of the animal's skin from the body, the construction of the mold that replaces its flesh, the sleight of hand that brings about a permanent version of the animal's old self. "Sometimes when the schoolchildren come and see taxidermy, they almost faint," he told me recently in his accented English (he grew up in Germany). "But it never had that effect on me."
During apartheid, displaying South African wildlife trophies behind glass accorded with the regime's image of itself as a first-world power; it showcased its dominion over nature. But since the changeover to a majority black government in the mid-90's, the natural history museum has turned away from Rau's kind of work. In addition to fauna, African culture has become an increasingly important focus; and video installations have superseded mounted animals in an attempt to present the natural world more on its own terms. Over time, all but one of Rau's colleagues in taxidermy have left the museum.
Technically, Rau, too, is retired, but as he says, "I never left and they never kicked me out." As a result he can still be found in his office, helping out on the occasional freelance taxidermy assignment. And there, past a mounted South American maned fox and a four-foot-long polyurethane model of a Permian Era reptile, he pursues his true passion: the Quagga Breeding Project.
The quagga was a horselike animal native to southern Africa that went extinct in 1883. Its head, neck and shoulders and sometimes the forward part of its flank were covered with stripes; the back part of its torso, its rump and legs were unstriped. An old joke among the Dutch, the first Europeans to settle in South Africa, was that the quagga was a zebra that had forgotten its pajama pants. Rau's goal, which he has been working toward for three decades, is to breed the quagga back into existence. His approach is to take zebras that look more quaggalike than the norm and mate them with one another, generation after generation, progressively erasing the stripes from the back part of their bodies.
This may sound preposterous. How likely is it that deliberate breeding can retrace the path of natural selection by which the quagga split off from the plains zebra more than a hundred thousand years ago? But over the years Rau's project has gained some establishment support. Several scientific studies of the zebra family, for instance, have suggested that plains zebras and quaggas were closely enough related to make Rau's project feasible from a genetic point of view. This is important to Rau, because he doesn't seem to want just to create a quagga look-alike but to recreate - or at least closely approximate - the genetic original. And beginning in the late 80's, the Namibian and South African park systems supplied Rau with promising animals so that he could put his ideas into practice. (The South African park system, as well as the natural history museum, also absorbs some of the small, ongoing cost of the project.)
Over years of breeding, Rau has made great progress creating zebras that look like quaggas. With each generation, his herds show fewer and fainter stripes in the back. "Even we have been surprised by the progress," he told me. Last January, Henry, Rau's most convincing quagga foal yet, was born on a private preserve outside Cape Town. Rau says that Henry, a third-generation descendant (on his mother's side) of the project's original zebras, is very near to perfection. He has some of the brownish color quaggas had and, if not for a few stripes on Henry's hocks - the joint in the middle of the hind leg - Rau says he would be tempted to announce that the project was done. His life's work would be finished, and to his mind, a great ecological wrong righted.
Still, Rau's project raises a lot of questions. Most central among them: If you breed something that looks like a certain animal, does that mean you have actually recreated that animal? What, in other words, gives an animal its identity - its genetic makeup? Its history? Its behavior? Its habitat? The problem, as it was put to me by Oliver Ryder, who directs a project at the San Diego Zoo to preserve rare-animal DNA, is that even if Rau succeeds in creating an animal with the exact appearance of a quagga, uncertainty will remain about what he has done. "We won't be able to know," Ryder said, "how much quagga-ness is in it."
Extinction is always a sad story, but the quagga's is sadder than most. The animal once lived in vast herds, often intermixed with gnu and ostriches, "for the society of which bird especially," the 19th-century English explorer Capt. William Cornwallis Harris noted, "it evinces the most singular predilection." That was probably Harris's fancy: in reality little is known about the quagga's behavior other than that it grazed on plains grass and emitted a bark - kwahaah! - in moments of danger or excitement. Dutch settlers recorded the name as "quacha," with a guttural "ch," and that remains the correct way to pronounce it: KWAH-ha.
The quagga had an unfortunate series of interactions with humans. Sportsmen on the Cape of Good Hope hunted the animal with enthusiasm. That was the first blow to the quagga. The second blow was an influx of farmers of Dutch or German origin, known as Voortrekkers, in the early 19th century into the quagga's home territory, the Karoo plain. The farmers did not want quaggas sharing grass with their livestock. When they saw a quagga, they shot it. They used the hide and gave the meat to the servants. (An 1838 article in The Penny Magazine commented that while the whites thought quagga tasted no better than horseflesh, "the natives, however, relish it.") The number of quaggas soon went into free fall. By the 1860's, they were scarce. A few decades earlier they numbered in the tens of thousands. By the 1870's there appeared to be none left in Africa.
Two things make the extinction of the quagga especially heart-rending. First was the manner of its disappearance. The quagga left the world so quietly that when the Cape Town colony finally put in place legislation to protect the animal, in 1886, the government didn't even know that the last quagga in the world died nearly three years before. Not only were there no quaggas living anywhere anymore, there were also apparently almost no dead quaggas to be found, either: little to nothing in the way of quagga rugs, stuffed quaggas, quagga photographs. An article in The New York Times in 1900 noted that "one poor skin in the Natural History Museum, London" seemed to be "all that remains of this noble creature to prove that it ever existed."
The other depressing thing about the disappearance of the quagga is that its fate seemed somehow connected to its ordinariness. The plains zebra, after all, filled a similar niche in nature. It, too, ate grassland that humans wanted for their livestock. But the plains zebra is a regal, stunning animal - "fierce, strong, fleet and surpassingly beautiful" in Captain Harris's words - whereas the quagga was ragtag. It seemed the sketch of something of which the plains zebra was the full realization, and so no one thought to save it.
But the quagga never entirely disappeared from memory. Its extinction has always managed to touch a few individuals, at different times and different places. It was one of the motivating forces behind a European pact in 1900 to preserve vanishing African species like the giraffe and the rhinoceros. And Otto Antonius, director of the Vienna zoo from 1924 to 1945, commissioned a painting called "The Extermination of the Quagga" - in which men on horseback fire as donkeylike heads rear up before a fusillade of bullets - as a reminder of the tragedy of the animal's elimination. Today, thanks to Rau, who bought the painting from Antonius's daughter, "The Extermination of the Quagga" belongs to the Quagga Breeding Project and can be found in the museum where Rau has his office.
Rau first became interested in the fate of the quagga in 1959, soon after he arrived at the South African Museum, where he came upon a poorly maintained stuffed quagga foal. It offended his professional standards as a taxidermist to see an extinct animal so neglected. "It was most crudely stuffed and stuck in the midst of other animals - I felt someone ought to do something about it," he recalled not long ago, when I first met him in Cape Town. "If you consider how ignorance and greed wiped out the quagga, this is a tragedy," he told me. He began to think he had a responsibility - even a destiny - to "reverse this disaster."
Rau is 73, a barrel-chested, compact man with a white beard and eyebrows that curl in spires over his eyes like the native South African plant spekboom. He has the intensity of people who have spent a long time opposing conventional thinking. When he began his quagga project, he expected - correctly - that he would meet with resistance from the scientific community. "Never trust a taxidermist on taxonomy," he said to me, with dry bitterness.
At the outset, Rau had no guidelines to follow. He knew as well as anyone that extinction was forever. (Even today, despite "Jurassic Park" fantasies, no one has been able to clone an extinct animal because DNA typically degrades too quickly.) But in the early 1970's he remembered something unusual he saw in his youth. When he was growing up near Frankfurt some 30 years before, he went to a circus where an animal called an auroch was paraded. The auroch, a powerful ox, had been extinct since the early 17th century, but two brothers, Lutz and Heinz Heck, both German zoo directors, each tried in the 1920's to recreate the beast by scrupulously mating existing breeds of cattle with one another - getting the auroch's body size from one, its coloring from another.
Rau suspected that it might be possible to reverse the extinction of the quagga the same way. The key would be to find the characteristics of the quagga in the existing zebra population, select zebras that exhibited such characteristics and breed them to bring out those characteristics. Paradoxically, what in part had condemned the quagga to extinction - its close relationship to the plains zebra - might now be its salvation.
Of course, there was a scientific objection to overcome. Most taxonomists have held that the quagga and the plains zebra were entirely separate species. While there is no universally accepted definition of a species - it is some combination of genetic difference, physical difference and inability to interbreed and produce fertile offspring (among other evolving criteria) - in general, taxonomists believe they know a species when they see it. By most definitions it is impossible to breed one separate species from another: they have diverged permanently, and you cannot reverse the evolutionary history to rejoin them. But Rau maintained that the quagga was merely a subspecies, or a color variant, of the plains zebra - distantly related enough to look different but closely related enough to be a candidate for interbreeding.
At the time, Rau had no captive zebra stock and no land to graze zebras on, so he couldn't test his hypothesis. And when he looked for help in starting up his project, he got nowhere. A letter from one national park official in South Africa described his project as "an academic exercise of very dubious conservation value." But Rau did not let the rejections demoralize him. "As a nonscientist, I could afford to have scientists look and sniff at me," he said. "I did not care about their opinions, and I did not have to care."
He began to gather evidence that the quagga had been a subspecies of the plains zebra. For one thing, he discovered, European colonists, following the Hottentots' example, apparently regarded the two animals as interchangeable: they used the word "quagga" for both. Also, Rau knew taxidermy - hides - and he knew that plains zebras were far from uniformly striped. In fact, as you went south, their stripes faded out, and they got browner. In other words, they became more quaggalike. That suggested a spectrum between quaggas and zebras, rather than two boxes with one species in each.
The next step was to examine as many preserved quagga specimens as he could. Though there are known photographs of only one living quagga, there are 23 mounted quaggas preserved at various museums throughout the world. (There had been 24 until 1945, when drunken Russian troops occupying a villa where the Germans had moved the museum holdings of Konigsberg threw one out a window.) Rau visited many of the extant quaggas in the early 70's, carefully cataloging their markings. He went to Mainz, Leiden, Munich, Wiesbaden and Amsterdam. He was approaching 40 and had no other obligations in his life. ("I had a fiancée once," he told me enigmatically. "She married an American.") As his expertise in quagga became known, he was invited by museums to restore the tattered quaggas he found, and when he did, feeling he was correcting the errors of previous taxidermists, he made small changes - old preserved skin has very little give - that also had the effect of making the animals look more like plains zebras. If he could not shape the future, it seemed, he could at least remake the past.
For all Rau's diligence, he couldn't find any institutional support. Without it, he did not have the resources to keep and breed animals. "I was about to give up," he told me. Then in 1981 he heard from Oliver Ryder, a geneticist associated with the San Diego Zoo. Ryder was looking for blood and skin samples of living zebras, but Rau wrote him back that he had something better - muscle and blood vessels preserved from extinct quaggas. (Whoever had first skinned those quaggas had done a sloppy job, leaving small pieces of flesh connected to the hide.) Ryder was thrilled. It was the moment Rau had been waiting for - he had been keeping bits of quagga flesh in reserve ever since he remounted a quagga in 1969 - and he sent the samples off.
Over the next few years, researchers successfully extracted portions of DNA from the quagga tissue - an achievement that in 1984 made front-page news throughout the world. (In the book "Jurassic Park," the successful recovery of quagga DNA emboldens entrepreneurial scientists to try cloning dinosaurs.) Rau, however, was not interested in the big news of the announcement: that cloning extinct animals might one day be possible. He was interested in a related experiment by Ryder, published the following year, which compared the proteins in plains zebras and quaggas and reported that "the quagga probably ought to be considered a variant of the plains zebra and not a distant species." In a letter to Rau, Ryder wrote, "This, I am sure, does not surprise you."
For Rau, this was the long-sought confirmation that his dream was achievable. A quagga could, in theory, be bred back into existence from zebras. On the strength of this result, in part, Rau was able to move his project forward. In 1986, the Namibian national parks agreed to supply him with a group of plains zebras, and one year later it sent him a hodgepodge of zebras captured in the Etosha National Park. Rau had arranged with the Cape Department of Nature Conservation for a farm to be set aside for the zebras and to have them delivered there. Some zebras died on the way, and some were the wrong color for the experiment. "I was not impressed overall with the quality of what we had," Rau recalled. Still, after 12 years of trying to get the world's attention, he was glad he could make a start.
This past August, on the 122nd anniversary of the death of the last quagga, I visited the Amsterdam Zoo, where the quagga spent its final years. The animal, a mare who was 12 years old at the time of her death, had been so tame she would allow people to pet her when her keeper was present. Consistent with the poor luck of her species, no one realized when she died that she was the last of her kind.
After her death, the mare's hide was mounted and put on display at the zoo. Over time its importance became known, but all the same, 15 years ago it was moved to a large room in a zoo building that is not open to the general public. When I approached the zoo about seeing the quagga, a pleasant semiretired biologist named P.J.H. van Bree said he would show it to me. When van Bree opened the door to the room, 50 sets of glass eyes met mine. Along with the quagga were dozens of taxidermic specimens, many from the Dutch past as a colonial power - rows of antelopes, zebras, a grizzly bear in an eight-foot-high plastic bag, a leopard and a black-maned cape lion, who, before humans extinguished it in the mid-1800's, may well have enjoyed more than one helping of quagga.
The quagga was in a climate-controlled case, but the front pane was not attached. The animal was in poor shape. Its skin was separating on its back and on a rear leg. I touched the animal's bristly back, its backward pointing ears, its sensitive muzzle. I touched its hind quarters, trying to sense the life that was once inside but finding only the cast the taxidermist had made.
To my eye, the quagga - this quagga anyway - looked more like a donkey than a zebra. It had a straight back, and its neck jutted forward. Its stripes were very light at the neck, fading to a moiré silkiness at midframe. Its underlying color was very brown. Across the room there was a glorious example of a mountain zebra looking like a small thoroughbred in a Mary Quant frock, and for me it was hard to believe that the two animals were related at all. The subject of Rau's quagga project came up, and van Bree expressed skepticism. "I have no objection," he said, "but just because a man may look like Napoleon, that does not make him Napoleon."
It's true that there is as much evidence that Rau's project is impossible as that it's possible. Since the 1985 study of quagga proteins, researchers have gone back and forth on the genetic and physical differences and similarities between the quagga and the plains zebra. The most recent and extensive analysis, published online last summer in Biology Letters of the Royal Society, suggested to some that the mitochondrial DNA of the plains zebra and the quagga was similar enough for them to be members of the same species but also said that there was no evidence that they had actually interbred. Rau saw the report as an endorsement of his ideas. But an author of the paper, Robert Fleischer of the Smithsonian Institution, told me that the scientists themselves had not been able to reach a conclusion as to what the relationship between the quagga and the plains zebra was. He said ultimately the question cannot be answered.
Why not? Partly because no one knows enough about quagga behavior. Species - even subspecies - don't differ just in shape and color from one another; they differ in behavior: foraging habits, social habits, aggressiveness. (It's here, for instance, that the auroch project, to rebreed the extinct European ox, foundered. What the Heck brothers got was a large ox with better horns but not an animal whose behavior necessarily matched that of its extinct antecedent.) Rau's mantra, which he said to me many times, is that the "quagga was nothing more than a southern variant of the plains zebra." He says it behaved exactly like the zebra in the wild. But the truth is that he doesn't know because the information doesn't exist. As van Bree told me, "before 1880 people were not interested in animal behavior."
Rau is a taxidermist, trained to recreate appearances, not to delve beneath them. But in the course of my conversations with several scientists, I noticed that those who talked about Rau, even those who condescended to his project, spoke of him with respect. For some, like Oliver Ryder, it doesn't seem to matter whether Rau is breeding a true quagga, or a zebra without its pajama pants, or an animal that looks like a quagga but doesn't share the quagga's genetic makeup. What seems to matter is that Rau does not accept that he is powerless to change the course of the mass extinction that has been under way for the past century. Instead he has reasserted the role of humans as custodians of nature. "They're going to thank us for what we save," Ryder told me. And ultimately what Rau may be saving is a part of ourselves.
' Not one man in a thousand has accuracy of eye and judgment sufficient to become an eminent breeder," Charles Darwin wrote in "The Origin of Species." Rau has turned out to have that rare touch. He is "a country boy," in his words, with a knack for animal husbandry. To make his zebras lose their stripes more quickly, he brought in some lightly striped zebras from South Africa's KwaZulu-Natal region and bred the two groups.
In the late summer, I went to see Henry, Rau's star quagga, for myself. Rau drove me out of Cape Town in one of the museum's vehicles for a tour of his animals, which now number more than 100. At first meeting, Rau can seem dogmatic, painting the world as us versus them, black versus white - but as I got to know him, he proved to be quite charming, with a flinty sense of humor. He lives alone in a southern suburb of Cape Town with two dogs and six species of European finch. The days I saw him he wore a striped sweater that had brown discolorations from where it dried on a radiator; it was as if he were working on becoming a quagga, too.
Often, in the early days of his project, when Rau did not have the money for game-quality fencing, he put his zebras wherever he found adequate barriers already in place. As a result I saw some of his animals at an explosives factory and others at a particle-accelerator facility. Today, the project still operates on a tiny budget drawn from individual contributions; but because several private game-preserve owners keep the animals as tourist draws, most of his animals live better. Henry, for instance, lives on a private preserve, owned by a wealthy plastics manufacturer, about 45 minutes north of Cape Town. The preserve is large enough that if Henry wants to stay out of sight, it is very unlikely a person can find him, even with a car. "Let's keep thumbs that the little boy will present himself," Rau said as we began our search.
Eventually, we found Henry grazing on a heath just down the hill from a gnu and near some bontebok. His stripes began at the head like a bandit's mask, his black comb stood up like a centurion's, but that was where his resemblance to a plains zebra ended: his pelt from his rib cages to his buttocks was a soft, almost-unstriped yellow brown. He also had that moiré silkiness to his middle that I saw in the hide in Amsterdam. "What a lovely thing he is," Rau kept saying, looking through his binoculars. "Look at those stripes. They go nowhere near the belly. That's very quagga."
Henry and his group - a stallion and three mares - had the grace of wild things. The sun shone off them, the ocean was behind the hills they ranged over and they seemed to hear a music I didn't. If the bontebok next to them ran, they ran. If one zebra turned and showed us its rump, they all did. The stallion stood apart, seemingly ready to fight if we made any sudden moves.
Not that the scene was actually truly wild - a cellphone rang in our S.U.V., there were power lines over the next hill and the landscape was full of vegetation that had come from Australia. Human intervention has changed this landscape in radical ways for 350 years. Whatever progress Rau may have made in bringing the quagga back to the world, we are not in the world the quagga knew, and it seems safe to say we will never be again.
Modern technology, though, may eventually carry the quagga project beyond where Rau can take it. Robert Fleischer at the Smithsonian told me that "not now, not in 6 but maybe in 20 years," technology would be available to repair DNA from extinct animals, which might then be used to clone them back to life. The high quality of the DNA samples from the quagga skins might make the quagga a candidate for this revival, Fleischer suggests. That would be very good news, although, arguably, still the easy part. There is nothing natural about a natural landscape remade by humans. What are we bringing these animals back to? "Let it also be borne in mind," Darwin wrote in "The Origin of Species," "how infinitely complex and close-fitting are the mutual relations of all organic beings to each other and to their physical conditions of life." You have to wonder if we are really intelligent enough to redesign nature.
This doubt was brought home to me on my way to see Rau, during a stop I made at Addo Elephant National Park, several hundred miles east of Cape Town near Port Elizabeth. Recently some of Rau's rejects from the quagga breeding project were released there, into what had been farmland not long ago, along with some lightly striped zebras bred by the national parks themselves. Rau said they had been sent to be "lions' lunch," but the lions, brought in from the Kalahari, where there are no zebras, didn't bother with them. They turned their attention instead to the local buffaloes. Lions usually have a hard time killing buffaloes - the buffaloes make a circle around their young and hold off the predators with their horns - but these buffaloes had lost their knowledge of how to defend themselves, so they were now easy targets. The park system relies on the sale of buffaloes to help finance the park's expansion; instead predators had pulled down 80 of them.
It was a striking example of how hard it is to restore nature once you have damaged it. For instance, even as Rau's creation is making its reappearance, its cousin the Grevy's zebra, an intensely striped zebra native to East Africa, has become threatened with extinction. Rau does not seem to think about these sorts of things much. He seems to accept that nothing he will do can mitigate the larger disaster that may be awaiting the natural world and that only some of the animals he so laboriously rebreeds will go to natural parks while the rest will go to hunting preserves - where they will be targets for sportsmen.
I asked Rau whether, given this vision of the future, spending 30 years to erase a half a set of stripes on an obscure extinct animal was worth it. We were driving on a highway outside Cape Town, no antelopes, no spekboom in sight, a long way from the Karoo, the dry plains where the quaggas had once lived in huge herds. "You would find it a bit disillusioning?" he asked. "Not to me. We would have given back to the Karoo - we will have given back to the Karoo - its original zebra. And that will be enough for me." A national-park official in South Africa has called Rau's project 'an academic exercise of very dubious conservation value.' But Rau has not let such opinions demoralize him.
Henry, the closest thing to a quagga in more than a century, on a preserve near Cape Town.
COFFEE
THE LATTE CLASS
New Yorker
On the train up from Philadelphia the other day, Bryant Simon, a professor of history at Temple University, overheard two conversations about Starbucks. When he reached Penn Station, he made a pit stop at the Starbucks at Thirty-fifth Street and Seventh Avenue. Then he began walking toward Grand Central, to catch a Metro-North train uptown, and passed a group of kids on the street, also talking about Starbucks. (“I guess a lot of people like twelve-dollar coffee,” one said.) He was headed for the corner of 125th Street and Lenox Avenue: the site of Harlem’s only Starbucks.
Simon, who is forty-four, is writing a book—a cross between “Bowling Alone” and “Fast Food Nation,” he hopes—about the world’s largest, and seemingly unavoidable, coffee-shop chain, which he has called “the corner bar of the twenty-first century.” Over the past year, he estimates that he’s been to three hundred Starbucks outlets in six countries. He sits in Starbucks for at least twelve hours a week, observing. In the course of his research, Simon has detected the occasional regional variation—in Guadalajara, for example, the Starbucks offers valet parking. But a few basic and universal mores hold true: moms predominate in late morning, teens take over after 3 p.m., and strangers who are not moms or teens must never engage one another.
At the 125th Street Starbucks, Simon quickly noticed a couple of irregularities, such as the hoop earrings belonging to one barista (“She shouldn’t be allowed to wear those”) and the lack of any ambient music or CDs for purchase. (Simon has obtained a copy of the employees’ manual, and is contemplating applying for a summer job.) The store was busy and cramped—too cramped, he thought—and lacked the usual niceties like upholstered furniture. The dinginess struck him as more than coincidence. “It’s a classic American story,” he said. “African-Americans get less of everything.”
Simon and a guest each ordered regular coffees, size Grande. All the tables were occupied, so they waited by the milk dispensers until a man in overalls sitting near the window got up and, in apparent violation of Starbucksian etiquette, approached. “There’s a chair right here, and a chair right there,” the man said, pointing at a couple of empty seats about ten feet apart. “Come on, it’s a community thing.”
Maybe it was a corner bar, after all. Simon took a seat by an elderly woman and a younger one. “I don’t actually know very much about coffee,” he confessed, glancing at the menu of specialty drinks on the wall. “I’ve ordered a mocha Frappuccino before, and hot chocolate. But most of this stuff just sounds gross.”
As he sat, and only occasionally sipped, Simon flipped through a composition book, where he records his Starbucks data. Unlike the man in overalls, Simon prefers not to approach strangers while in Starbucks (“It’s a biased sample”), so, to pass the time, he often counts customers. On one page, from a stop in Singapore, he’d noted forty-eight people between 2:22 p.m. and 3:40 p.m.; all but six stayed and sat. In downtown Philly, by contrast, he saw forty-four in a twenty-oneminute span, thirty-three of whom ordered their drinks to go.
Simon has a number of Starbucks informants, such as his best friend’s niece, a twelve-year-old in Brooklyn Heights. “She calls it Flirtbucks,” he said. “She doesn’t drink coffee—she’s afraid it’ll stunt her growth—but boys try to impress her by drinking coffee drinks.” In Brooklyn Heights, apparently, it is cool to go to Starbucks if you are eleven or twelve, but not once you turn fourteen. “Whereas along the Main Line near Philadelphia, it remains hip until about age twenty,” Simon said.
Back at the Harlem branch, a man gestured toward a plastic bag full of electronics on the floor. “Can I interest you in some headphones?” he asked. Simon declined, and pulled out his computer. He demonstrated that access to Starbucks.com is free, whereas IHateStarbucks.com, say, and StarbucksGossip.com require a T-Mobile account. Aficionados of the latter Web site may be aware of the existence of Winter, another man with a special interest in Starbucks. Winter aims to visit every Starbucks in the world, a feat that does not interest Simon. (Winter’s record of twenty-nine Starbucks visited in one day surpasses Simon’s sixteen.) “They open, like, three to four stores a day,” he said. “To me it just seems like, what’s the guy—is it Sisyphus?—who’s pushing the rock up the hill?”
Simon has a twenty-minute rule of thumb: if you stay at Starbucks twenty minutes or less, you’re drinking; more than twenty minutes, you’re working. After an hour or so, he excused himself to visit the restroom, which he later deemed unimpressive. (“The mirror cost, like, $2.99.”) His cup remained about half full.
New Yorker
With the bowl games at hand, the N.B.A. and N.H.L. seasons in full flow, the N.F.L. playoffs just ahead, and pitchers-and-catchers a bare six weeks away, sports fans may be wondering once again why all this repletion isn’t more satisfying. Sports news abounds, with the talk shows easily outnumbering the games actually being played, but what’s missing still is the crazy, cozy old sense of identification that once tied the fan by the set or in the stands to the young athletes out on the field. The attachment was steady until a couple of decades ago, and what did it in wasn’t so much salaries or steroids or free agency as the astoundingly changed dimensions and reflexes of the modern player. Professional athletes once looked like somebody we knew, that friendly young fellow down the block who could run fast and dunk the ball or throw it a mile—not us exactly but close enough, and there in the games to represent if not always our town or our college then our species. This illusion waned when everyday N.B.A. players grew to six feet eight or better and N.F.L. linemen suddenly averaged two hundred and ninety pounds and could run forty yards in under six seconds. Well, O.K., there was still baseball, where the sweet connection first flourished. Our fathers or grandfathers, at ease in their good grandstand seats behind third base, could look out at Red Schoendienst or Bill Mazeroski or Tom Tresh and think, Well, with a little luck . . . The regulars took home each year just about what a pediatrician or a V.P. for sales or a steady C.P.A. earned. They were us, if we were doing well, in short, and chances were that we’d have succeeded at their game, too, if we’d taken a crack at it. Well, dream on, Gramps—or, as Hemingway’s Jake Barnes said, isn’t it pretty to think so? Now, in any case, all that’s gone. Try to get down near field level before your next ballgame and take a look at Derek Jeter or Jeff Kent or Dontrelle Willis as they stroll by: wow, these guys are enormous.
The dream of intimacy—it was always fantasy—is gone, and today’s players, so close to us on our plasma screens, are galaxies away from our own doings and capabilities. The loss hurts—no wonder the hosts and guests on the TV sports shows look so angry—and we are casting about to close the distance. If we can bring ourselves to think of professional athletes as rock stars, which they so resemble, we can find them on the wildly popular MTV program “Cribs,” which has taken viewers to the lush quarters of Snoop Dogg and Mariah Carey and Missy Elliott (a giant replica of her signature is set in the floor of her front hall), and also to Johnny Damon’s home in Tampa, where the dining room features an altered version of “The Last Supper,” with the heads of former fellow Red Sox players replacing the Apostles around the table. On various Web sites, we can also find Shaquille O’Neal’s lobby-size bed with its Superman-logo bedspread, and the heroic bronze statue of Pudge Rodriguez that decorates his own back yard. Roger Clemens, who has yet to appear on “Cribs,” has granted the occasional journalist a visit to his fifteen-thousand-square-foot home in the Piney Point area of Houston, with its Hall of Bats; its floor-to-ceiling golf-ball holders on either side of his study desk, containing three hundred and four golf balls each (one for each course he has played to date); and a bedroom that features lighted display cases and a wet bar. Gasping at the stars’ enormous pads and rolling acres and their outsized fridges (empty, for the most part, except for the obligatory bottle of Cristal) and snickering at such monumental garishness and infantile taste is all right for the sub-twenty age group that “Cribs” aims at, but it’s still not what we fans are after. What we yearn for may be contained in the question that every sportswriter keeps hearing from his readers: “What’s Willie Mays”—or Phil Mickelson or Andy Roddick—“really like?” Willie, as it happens, is cranky and private in person (he’s seventy-four years old) and passably complex, but this news, of course, is not what’s wanted. The desired, almost the demanded, answer is that he’s a great guy: he’s exactly like us.
The Times, on a recent Saturday, featured an extended visit to the New York apartment of Tiki Barber, now in his ninth year as the featured running back for the New York Giants. Barber, a known sports good guy, is thirty and on the edge of superstardom, and here he was, with that shaved head and sweet smile, at play with his twenty-one-month-old son, Chason, and then with his feet up on an ottoman, gabbing with his animated wife, Ginny. Their four-thousand-square-foot apartment has a twelve-foot-high trophy case, a flat-screen TV in every room, and space for a private suite for Ginny’s parents, but in the story it felt modest enough to allow a sports-fan reader to feel right at home, even familiar. Nice place, Tiki, but this striped, nail-head bench—what were you thinking? And that bedroom for Chason’s three-year-old brother, A.J.—do you want a kid growing toward his teens staring at a mural every day where he’s holding up a sign that says “Go Tiki #21!” C’mon!
This sense of wry palship, a Schadenfreude dekorative, lasted for local fans right up until kickoff time, late that same afternoon, when Tiki Barber and the Giants took on the visiting Kansas City Chiefs at the Meadowlands, and beat them, 27–17, to put themselves one game away from clinching the National Football Conference East division. There was plenty of Tiki to watch and yell over. He is midsized and not particularly fast as running backs go, but here he was, again cruising close to his blockers and then finding the hole or the invisible seam and driving for yardage before disappearing under a vanload of tacklers. The Giants scored a couple of field goals and a touchdown on a pass from Eli Manning to Amani Toomer, but the play of the day was a second-quarter run by Tiki, around the left side and then brilliantly back and forth between grasping and flying frustrated Chief defensemen, forty-one yards, for a touchdown. He ran some more after that, driving in for the twenty-yard clinching touchdown late in the day—it was night by now, and you kept your eye on his gleaming blue helmet in motion, always a little lower than the rest. In the end, he’d run two hundred and twenty yards from scrimmage—and away from us, you might say—for a franchise record, and had compiled 1,577 rushing yards for the season, breaking the team record he set last year. Great game, Tiki. Out of sight.
MOVIES
MATCH POINT
New Yorker
You could say that Woody Allen, by shifting his milieu from New York’s Upper East Side to London’s elegant Belgravia, has not so much re-invented himself (as some have suggested) as gone back to the motherland of the Wasp good taste he’s always aspired to. But there’s no need to be rude. Whatever Allen’s needs or motives, a change of light and scenery was obviously good for him. His new movie, “Match Point,” devoted to lust, adultery, and murder, is the most vigorous thing he’s done in years. The beginning, however, is lame: we’re introduced to an Irish-born tennis pro, Chris Wilton (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), a very good player—he played Andre Agassi a couple of times—who is now teaching at a posh London club, where he meets Tom Hewett (Matthew Goode), the lanky, easygoing son of a wealthy family. Tom takes a shine to Chris, who comes from a poor background but has upwardly mobile tastes—he loves opera—and introduces him to his friends and relatives, including his sister, Chloe (Emily Mortimer). In the family box at Covent Garden, Chloe keeps shifting her gaze from “La Traviata” to the handsome young tennis player sitting behind her. Chris’s visit to the Hewett country estate follows soon after.
The trouble with these scenes is that they feel falsely debonair. The twitty rhythms and studied languor of Tom’s idiom (“I’ve got some serious cocktails to start making”) and the good-hearted effusions of Chloe, who is described as “frighteningly bright” but comes off as vapid, sound more like the small talk in a drawing-room comedy from 1956 than like the London of today. And, at first, Allen’s dramatic construction is more opportunistic than convincing: Chloe falls instantly and irreversibly in love with Chris, and her father (Brian Cox), some sort of corporate tycoon, takes Chris into his business without any hesitation. Can the English upper class really be this unguarded? At the firm, Chris rises like a moon shot, though we never find out what the business does or what he does, except dress beautifully, get driven around town in a company Jag, and talk on the phone. The movie is framed by a philosophical meditation on the importance of luck, but it’s Allen’s script, not luck, that sends Chris so rapidly into the stratosphere.
In these early glimpses of the Hewett circle, there’s another guest—Nola Rice (Scarlett Johansson), a young American actress of no particular talent but overwhelming allure, who is Tom’s fiancée. Nola and Chris impudently flirt when they first meet; later, they bump into each other on the street and go to a bar, and, at that moment, the movie takes off. The two great-looking outsiders are perfectly matched. The slender Irish actor Jonathan Rhys Meyers (from “Bend It Like Beckham”) has widely spaced blue eyes, slightly flaring nostrils, and a flattened upper lip—he can look pensive or brutally calculating at will. Chris, as Rhys Meyers plays him, has perfect manners joined to rather frightening sang-froid. He’s avid, as Tony Curtis used to say—avid for love, for money, for everything—and he doesn’t care who notices it. Scarlett Johansson wears her blond hair up, which brings out the oval shape of her face and the soft beauty of her features, and she, too, has an unusual upper lip, curved and fleshy, and a low, smoky voice. Allen cuts back and forth between closeups of these two; the technique couldn’t be more straightforward, but it’s richly suggestive. Nola is lost and hanging on to Tom—she has the neurotic vulnerability that has always appealed to Allen, though she’s more openly sexual than his past heroines. She views Chris with amusement as a successful interloper, and advises him not to blow it by making a pass. But he sees her as a prize that is just as available to him as to Tom. He marries the chattering heiress Chloe, but he pursues Nola, and the mutual fascination that was so powerful in the bar feeds into the most passionate and explicitly erotic love scenes that Allen has ever directed. Despite all the complaints about sex in the movies, there isn’t that much of it, and almost none that is convincing. In this movie, lust carries everything before it—at least for a while. We are warned of trouble ahead by the music that Allen has chosen to accompany the love scenes—Enrico Caruso, at his most tender and ardent, singing arias from Italian opera, the genre of art that insists that sexual passion leads to violence.
The small talk drops away, the emotional temperature rises, and the directness and speed of the movie now feel right. And a certain cruelty, which has always been lodged in the underside of Allen’s sense of character, comes out. Given the stakes in money and power, that feels right, too. Chloe wants a child, and turns herself into a fertility laboratory—consulting doctors and setting hours for Chris to make love to her. But he’s already bored, and when Nola, whom he loves, gets pregnant, he has got one woman too many on his hands. In outline, the situation resembles that of Dreiser’s “An American Tragedy” (and its movie version, “A Place in the Sun”), in which a poor boy irresistibly drawn to a rich girl and all the pleasant luxuries that come with her manages to get his impoverished girlfriend pregnant. The issue for Chris comes down to this: what’s more important, love or money?
The way he “solves” his problem—by murdering one of the women— seems to have struck a number of the movie’s early viewers as unbelievable. After all, they say, this is modern life, and these things can be worked out. But intelligent people do occasionally commit murder, and not just in fictions concocted by Patricia Highsmith or P. D. James. If “Match Point” gives offense, the real reason, I suspect, is not that it’s implausible but that it forces us into complicity with a killer. Filmmakers understand the laws of narrative all too well: an audience, properly hooked by point-of-view shooting, will root for a bank robber or a murderer to get away with whatever he’s doing. Chris Wilton lies to everyone, grows more and more desperate, and, as he plans and pulls off a terrible crime, we are with him at every step. In the end, Allen returns to the role of luck and to an old obsession from “Crimes and Misdemeanors”—the question of whether there is any justice in the universe. But the abstract talk is just window dressing. “Match Point” is, at its core, the latest version of a story that has served as a bedrock of fiction for almost two hundred years: a young man from the provinces storms the big city with boldness and sexual charm and then gets in trouble. And we’re left, as always, identifying with his desire and regretting its consequences—which means, willy-nilly, chastening our own desire, too.
Can You Revive an Extinct Animal? By D.T. MAX
NY Times
Reinhold Rau is one of the last of his breed. He was once part of a team of seven taxidermists who, during the apartheid years in South Africa, mounted mammals and birds for the natural-history museum in Cape Town. You can still see his work there. The leopard moving toward its prey on the third floor is Rau's creation, as is the zebra fawn in a nearby glass case, taking shelter under an adult. Rau loves his work - the stripping of the animal's skin from the body, the construction of the mold that replaces its flesh, the sleight of hand that brings about a permanent version of the animal's old self. "Sometimes when the schoolchildren come and see taxidermy, they almost faint," he told me recently in his accented English (he grew up in Germany). "But it never had that effect on me."
During apartheid, displaying South African wildlife trophies behind glass accorded with the regime's image of itself as a first-world power; it showcased its dominion over nature. But since the changeover to a majority black government in the mid-90's, the natural history museum has turned away from Rau's kind of work. In addition to fauna, African culture has become an increasingly important focus; and video installations have superseded mounted animals in an attempt to present the natural world more on its own terms. Over time, all but one of Rau's colleagues in taxidermy have left the museum.
Technically, Rau, too, is retired, but as he says, "I never left and they never kicked me out." As a result he can still be found in his office, helping out on the occasional freelance taxidermy assignment. And there, past a mounted South American maned fox and a four-foot-long polyurethane model of a Permian Era reptile, he pursues his true passion: the Quagga Breeding Project.
The quagga was a horselike animal native to southern Africa that went extinct in 1883. Its head, neck and shoulders and sometimes the forward part of its flank were covered with stripes; the back part of its torso, its rump and legs were unstriped. An old joke among the Dutch, the first Europeans to settle in South Africa, was that the quagga was a zebra that had forgotten its pajama pants. Rau's goal, which he has been working toward for three decades, is to breed the quagga back into existence. His approach is to take zebras that look more quaggalike than the norm and mate them with one another, generation after generation, progressively erasing the stripes from the back part of their bodies.
This may sound preposterous. How likely is it that deliberate breeding can retrace the path of natural selection by which the quagga split off from the plains zebra more than a hundred thousand years ago? But over the years Rau's project has gained some establishment support. Several scientific studies of the zebra family, for instance, have suggested that plains zebras and quaggas were closely enough related to make Rau's project feasible from a genetic point of view. This is important to Rau, because he doesn't seem to want just to create a quagga look-alike but to recreate - or at least closely approximate - the genetic original. And beginning in the late 80's, the Namibian and South African park systems supplied Rau with promising animals so that he could put his ideas into practice. (The South African park system, as well as the natural history museum, also absorbs some of the small, ongoing cost of the project.)
Over years of breeding, Rau has made great progress creating zebras that look like quaggas. With each generation, his herds show fewer and fainter stripes in the back. "Even we have been surprised by the progress," he told me. Last January, Henry, Rau's most convincing quagga foal yet, was born on a private preserve outside Cape Town. Rau says that Henry, a third-generation descendant (on his mother's side) of the project's original zebras, is very near to perfection. He has some of the brownish color quaggas had and, if not for a few stripes on Henry's hocks - the joint in the middle of the hind leg - Rau says he would be tempted to announce that the project was done. His life's work would be finished, and to his mind, a great ecological wrong righted.
Still, Rau's project raises a lot of questions. Most central among them: If you breed something that looks like a certain animal, does that mean you have actually recreated that animal? What, in other words, gives an animal its identity - its genetic makeup? Its history? Its behavior? Its habitat? The problem, as it was put to me by Oliver Ryder, who directs a project at the San Diego Zoo to preserve rare-animal DNA, is that even if Rau succeeds in creating an animal with the exact appearance of a quagga, uncertainty will remain about what he has done. "We won't be able to know," Ryder said, "how much quagga-ness is in it."
Extinction is always a sad story, but the quagga's is sadder than most. The animal once lived in vast herds, often intermixed with gnu and ostriches, "for the society of which bird especially," the 19th-century English explorer Capt. William Cornwallis Harris noted, "it evinces the most singular predilection." That was probably Harris's fancy: in reality little is known about the quagga's behavior other than that it grazed on plains grass and emitted a bark - kwahaah! - in moments of danger or excitement. Dutch settlers recorded the name as "quacha," with a guttural "ch," and that remains the correct way to pronounce it: KWAH-ha.
The quagga had an unfortunate series of interactions with humans. Sportsmen on the Cape of Good Hope hunted the animal with enthusiasm. That was the first blow to the quagga. The second blow was an influx of farmers of Dutch or German origin, known as Voortrekkers, in the early 19th century into the quagga's home territory, the Karoo plain. The farmers did not want quaggas sharing grass with their livestock. When they saw a quagga, they shot it. They used the hide and gave the meat to the servants. (An 1838 article in The Penny Magazine commented that while the whites thought quagga tasted no better than horseflesh, "the natives, however, relish it.") The number of quaggas soon went into free fall. By the 1860's, they were scarce. A few decades earlier they numbered in the tens of thousands. By the 1870's there appeared to be none left in Africa.
Two things make the extinction of the quagga especially heart-rending. First was the manner of its disappearance. The quagga left the world so quietly that when the Cape Town colony finally put in place legislation to protect the animal, in 1886, the government didn't even know that the last quagga in the world died nearly three years before. Not only were there no quaggas living anywhere anymore, there were also apparently almost no dead quaggas to be found, either: little to nothing in the way of quagga rugs, stuffed quaggas, quagga photographs. An article in The New York Times in 1900 noted that "one poor skin in the Natural History Museum, London" seemed to be "all that remains of this noble creature to prove that it ever existed."
The other depressing thing about the disappearance of the quagga is that its fate seemed somehow connected to its ordinariness. The plains zebra, after all, filled a similar niche in nature. It, too, ate grassland that humans wanted for their livestock. But the plains zebra is a regal, stunning animal - "fierce, strong, fleet and surpassingly beautiful" in Captain Harris's words - whereas the quagga was ragtag. It seemed the sketch of something of which the plains zebra was the full realization, and so no one thought to save it.
But the quagga never entirely disappeared from memory. Its extinction has always managed to touch a few individuals, at different times and different places. It was one of the motivating forces behind a European pact in 1900 to preserve vanishing African species like the giraffe and the rhinoceros. And Otto Antonius, director of the Vienna zoo from 1924 to 1945, commissioned a painting called "The Extermination of the Quagga" - in which men on horseback fire as donkeylike heads rear up before a fusillade of bullets - as a reminder of the tragedy of the animal's elimination. Today, thanks to Rau, who bought the painting from Antonius's daughter, "The Extermination of the Quagga" belongs to the Quagga Breeding Project and can be found in the museum where Rau has his office.
Rau first became interested in the fate of the quagga in 1959, soon after he arrived at the South African Museum, where he came upon a poorly maintained stuffed quagga foal. It offended his professional standards as a taxidermist to see an extinct animal so neglected. "It was most crudely stuffed and stuck in the midst of other animals - I felt someone ought to do something about it," he recalled not long ago, when I first met him in Cape Town. "If you consider how ignorance and greed wiped out the quagga, this is a tragedy," he told me. He began to think he had a responsibility - even a destiny - to "reverse this disaster."
Rau is 73, a barrel-chested, compact man with a white beard and eyebrows that curl in spires over his eyes like the native South African plant spekboom. He has the intensity of people who have spent a long time opposing conventional thinking. When he began his quagga project, he expected - correctly - that he would meet with resistance from the scientific community. "Never trust a taxidermist on taxonomy," he said to me, with dry bitterness.
At the outset, Rau had no guidelines to follow. He knew as well as anyone that extinction was forever. (Even today, despite "Jurassic Park" fantasies, no one has been able to clone an extinct animal because DNA typically degrades too quickly.) But in the early 1970's he remembered something unusual he saw in his youth. When he was growing up near Frankfurt some 30 years before, he went to a circus where an animal called an auroch was paraded. The auroch, a powerful ox, had been extinct since the early 17th century, but two brothers, Lutz and Heinz Heck, both German zoo directors, each tried in the 1920's to recreate the beast by scrupulously mating existing breeds of cattle with one another - getting the auroch's body size from one, its coloring from another.
Rau suspected that it might be possible to reverse the extinction of the quagga the same way. The key would be to find the characteristics of the quagga in the existing zebra population, select zebras that exhibited such characteristics and breed them to bring out those characteristics. Paradoxically, what in part had condemned the quagga to extinction - its close relationship to the plains zebra - might now be its salvation.
Of course, there was a scientific objection to overcome. Most taxonomists have held that the quagga and the plains zebra were entirely separate species. While there is no universally accepted definition of a species - it is some combination of genetic difference, physical difference and inability to interbreed and produce fertile offspring (among other evolving criteria) - in general, taxonomists believe they know a species when they see it. By most definitions it is impossible to breed one separate species from another: they have diverged permanently, and you cannot reverse the evolutionary history to rejoin them. But Rau maintained that the quagga was merely a subspecies, or a color variant, of the plains zebra - distantly related enough to look different but closely related enough to be a candidate for interbreeding.
At the time, Rau had no captive zebra stock and no land to graze zebras on, so he couldn't test his hypothesis. And when he looked for help in starting up his project, he got nowhere. A letter from one national park official in South Africa described his project as "an academic exercise of very dubious conservation value." But Rau did not let the rejections demoralize him. "As a nonscientist, I could afford to have scientists look and sniff at me," he said. "I did not care about their opinions, and I did not have to care."
He began to gather evidence that the quagga had been a subspecies of the plains zebra. For one thing, he discovered, European colonists, following the Hottentots' example, apparently regarded the two animals as interchangeable: they used the word "quagga" for both. Also, Rau knew taxidermy - hides - and he knew that plains zebras were far from uniformly striped. In fact, as you went south, their stripes faded out, and they got browner. In other words, they became more quaggalike. That suggested a spectrum between quaggas and zebras, rather than two boxes with one species in each.
The next step was to examine as many preserved quagga specimens as he could. Though there are known photographs of only one living quagga, there are 23 mounted quaggas preserved at various museums throughout the world. (There had been 24 until 1945, when drunken Russian troops occupying a villa where the Germans had moved the museum holdings of Konigsberg threw one out a window.) Rau visited many of the extant quaggas in the early 70's, carefully cataloging their markings. He went to Mainz, Leiden, Munich, Wiesbaden and Amsterdam. He was approaching 40 and had no other obligations in his life. ("I had a fiancée once," he told me enigmatically. "She married an American.") As his expertise in quagga became known, he was invited by museums to restore the tattered quaggas he found, and when he did, feeling he was correcting the errors of previous taxidermists, he made small changes - old preserved skin has very little give - that also had the effect of making the animals look more like plains zebras. If he could not shape the future, it seemed, he could at least remake the past.
For all Rau's diligence, he couldn't find any institutional support. Without it, he did not have the resources to keep and breed animals. "I was about to give up," he told me. Then in 1981 he heard from Oliver Ryder, a geneticist associated with the San Diego Zoo. Ryder was looking for blood and skin samples of living zebras, but Rau wrote him back that he had something better - muscle and blood vessels preserved from extinct quaggas. (Whoever had first skinned those quaggas had done a sloppy job, leaving small pieces of flesh connected to the hide.) Ryder was thrilled. It was the moment Rau had been waiting for - he had been keeping bits of quagga flesh in reserve ever since he remounted a quagga in 1969 - and he sent the samples off.
Over the next few years, researchers successfully extracted portions of DNA from the quagga tissue - an achievement that in 1984 made front-page news throughout the world. (In the book "Jurassic Park," the successful recovery of quagga DNA emboldens entrepreneurial scientists to try cloning dinosaurs.) Rau, however, was not interested in the big news of the announcement: that cloning extinct animals might one day be possible. He was interested in a related experiment by Ryder, published the following year, which compared the proteins in plains zebras and quaggas and reported that "the quagga probably ought to be considered a variant of the plains zebra and not a distant species." In a letter to Rau, Ryder wrote, "This, I am sure, does not surprise you."
For Rau, this was the long-sought confirmation that his dream was achievable. A quagga could, in theory, be bred back into existence from zebras. On the strength of this result, in part, Rau was able to move his project forward. In 1986, the Namibian national parks agreed to supply him with a group of plains zebras, and one year later it sent him a hodgepodge of zebras captured in the Etosha National Park. Rau had arranged with the Cape Department of Nature Conservation for a farm to be set aside for the zebras and to have them delivered there. Some zebras died on the way, and some were the wrong color for the experiment. "I was not impressed overall with the quality of what we had," Rau recalled. Still, after 12 years of trying to get the world's attention, he was glad he could make a start.
This past August, on the 122nd anniversary of the death of the last quagga, I visited the Amsterdam Zoo, where the quagga spent its final years. The animal, a mare who was 12 years old at the time of her death, had been so tame she would allow people to pet her when her keeper was present. Consistent with the poor luck of her species, no one realized when she died that she was the last of her kind.
After her death, the mare's hide was mounted and put on display at the zoo. Over time its importance became known, but all the same, 15 years ago it was moved to a large room in a zoo building that is not open to the general public. When I approached the zoo about seeing the quagga, a pleasant semiretired biologist named P.J.H. van Bree said he would show it to me. When van Bree opened the door to the room, 50 sets of glass eyes met mine. Along with the quagga were dozens of taxidermic specimens, many from the Dutch past as a colonial power - rows of antelopes, zebras, a grizzly bear in an eight-foot-high plastic bag, a leopard and a black-maned cape lion, who, before humans extinguished it in the mid-1800's, may well have enjoyed more than one helping of quagga.
The quagga was in a climate-controlled case, but the front pane was not attached. The animal was in poor shape. Its skin was separating on its back and on a rear leg. I touched the animal's bristly back, its backward pointing ears, its sensitive muzzle. I touched its hind quarters, trying to sense the life that was once inside but finding only the cast the taxidermist had made.
To my eye, the quagga - this quagga anyway - looked more like a donkey than a zebra. It had a straight back, and its neck jutted forward. Its stripes were very light at the neck, fading to a moiré silkiness at midframe. Its underlying color was very brown. Across the room there was a glorious example of a mountain zebra looking like a small thoroughbred in a Mary Quant frock, and for me it was hard to believe that the two animals were related at all. The subject of Rau's quagga project came up, and van Bree expressed skepticism. "I have no objection," he said, "but just because a man may look like Napoleon, that does not make him Napoleon."
It's true that there is as much evidence that Rau's project is impossible as that it's possible. Since the 1985 study of quagga proteins, researchers have gone back and forth on the genetic and physical differences and similarities between the quagga and the plains zebra. The most recent and extensive analysis, published online last summer in Biology Letters of the Royal Society, suggested to some that the mitochondrial DNA of the plains zebra and the quagga was similar enough for them to be members of the same species but also said that there was no evidence that they had actually interbred. Rau saw the report as an endorsement of his ideas. But an author of the paper, Robert Fleischer of the Smithsonian Institution, told me that the scientists themselves had not been able to reach a conclusion as to what the relationship between the quagga and the plains zebra was. He said ultimately the question cannot be answered.
Why not? Partly because no one knows enough about quagga behavior. Species - even subspecies - don't differ just in shape and color from one another; they differ in behavior: foraging habits, social habits, aggressiveness. (It's here, for instance, that the auroch project, to rebreed the extinct European ox, foundered. What the Heck brothers got was a large ox with better horns but not an animal whose behavior necessarily matched that of its extinct antecedent.) Rau's mantra, which he said to me many times, is that the "quagga was nothing more than a southern variant of the plains zebra." He says it behaved exactly like the zebra in the wild. But the truth is that he doesn't know because the information doesn't exist. As van Bree told me, "before 1880 people were not interested in animal behavior."
Rau is a taxidermist, trained to recreate appearances, not to delve beneath them. But in the course of my conversations with several scientists, I noticed that those who talked about Rau, even those who condescended to his project, spoke of him with respect. For some, like Oliver Ryder, it doesn't seem to matter whether Rau is breeding a true quagga, or a zebra without its pajama pants, or an animal that looks like a quagga but doesn't share the quagga's genetic makeup. What seems to matter is that Rau does not accept that he is powerless to change the course of the mass extinction that has been under way for the past century. Instead he has reasserted the role of humans as custodians of nature. "They're going to thank us for what we save," Ryder told me. And ultimately what Rau may be saving is a part of ourselves.
' Not one man in a thousand has accuracy of eye and judgment sufficient to become an eminent breeder," Charles Darwin wrote in "The Origin of Species." Rau has turned out to have that rare touch. He is "a country boy," in his words, with a knack for animal husbandry. To make his zebras lose their stripes more quickly, he brought in some lightly striped zebras from South Africa's KwaZulu-Natal region and bred the two groups.
In the late summer, I went to see Henry, Rau's star quagga, for myself. Rau drove me out of Cape Town in one of the museum's vehicles for a tour of his animals, which now number more than 100. At first meeting, Rau can seem dogmatic, painting the world as us versus them, black versus white - but as I got to know him, he proved to be quite charming, with a flinty sense of humor. He lives alone in a southern suburb of Cape Town with two dogs and six species of European finch. The days I saw him he wore a striped sweater that had brown discolorations from where it dried on a radiator; it was as if he were working on becoming a quagga, too.
Often, in the early days of his project, when Rau did not have the money for game-quality fencing, he put his zebras wherever he found adequate barriers already in place. As a result I saw some of his animals at an explosives factory and others at a particle-accelerator facility. Today, the project still operates on a tiny budget drawn from individual contributions; but because several private game-preserve owners keep the animals as tourist draws, most of his animals live better. Henry, for instance, lives on a private preserve, owned by a wealthy plastics manufacturer, about 45 minutes north of Cape Town. The preserve is large enough that if Henry wants to stay out of sight, it is very unlikely a person can find him, even with a car. "Let's keep thumbs that the little boy will present himself," Rau said as we began our search.
Eventually, we found Henry grazing on a heath just down the hill from a gnu and near some bontebok. His stripes began at the head like a bandit's mask, his black comb stood up like a centurion's, but that was where his resemblance to a plains zebra ended: his pelt from his rib cages to his buttocks was a soft, almost-unstriped yellow brown. He also had that moiré silkiness to his middle that I saw in the hide in Amsterdam. "What a lovely thing he is," Rau kept saying, looking through his binoculars. "Look at those stripes. They go nowhere near the belly. That's very quagga."
Henry and his group - a stallion and three mares - had the grace of wild things. The sun shone off them, the ocean was behind the hills they ranged over and they seemed to hear a music I didn't. If the bontebok next to them ran, they ran. If one zebra turned and showed us its rump, they all did. The stallion stood apart, seemingly ready to fight if we made any sudden moves.
Not that the scene was actually truly wild - a cellphone rang in our S.U.V., there were power lines over the next hill and the landscape was full of vegetation that had come from Australia. Human intervention has changed this landscape in radical ways for 350 years. Whatever progress Rau may have made in bringing the quagga back to the world, we are not in the world the quagga knew, and it seems safe to say we will never be again.
Modern technology, though, may eventually carry the quagga project beyond where Rau can take it. Robert Fleischer at the Smithsonian told me that "not now, not in 6 but maybe in 20 years," technology would be available to repair DNA from extinct animals, which might then be used to clone them back to life. The high quality of the DNA samples from the quagga skins might make the quagga a candidate for this revival, Fleischer suggests. That would be very good news, although, arguably, still the easy part. There is nothing natural about a natural landscape remade by humans. What are we bringing these animals back to? "Let it also be borne in mind," Darwin wrote in "The Origin of Species," "how infinitely complex and close-fitting are the mutual relations of all organic beings to each other and to their physical conditions of life." You have to wonder if we are really intelligent enough to redesign nature.
This doubt was brought home to me on my way to see Rau, during a stop I made at Addo Elephant National Park, several hundred miles east of Cape Town near Port Elizabeth. Recently some of Rau's rejects from the quagga breeding project were released there, into what had been farmland not long ago, along with some lightly striped zebras bred by the national parks themselves. Rau said they had been sent to be "lions' lunch," but the lions, brought in from the Kalahari, where there are no zebras, didn't bother with them. They turned their attention instead to the local buffaloes. Lions usually have a hard time killing buffaloes - the buffaloes make a circle around their young and hold off the predators with their horns - but these buffaloes had lost their knowledge of how to defend themselves, so they were now easy targets. The park system relies on the sale of buffaloes to help finance the park's expansion; instead predators had pulled down 80 of them.
It was a striking example of how hard it is to restore nature once you have damaged it. For instance, even as Rau's creation is making its reappearance, its cousin the Grevy's zebra, an intensely striped zebra native to East Africa, has become threatened with extinction. Rau does not seem to think about these sorts of things much. He seems to accept that nothing he will do can mitigate the larger disaster that may be awaiting the natural world and that only some of the animals he so laboriously rebreeds will go to natural parks while the rest will go to hunting preserves - where they will be targets for sportsmen.
I asked Rau whether, given this vision of the future, spending 30 years to erase a half a set of stripes on an obscure extinct animal was worth it. We were driving on a highway outside Cape Town, no antelopes, no spekboom in sight, a long way from the Karoo, the dry plains where the quaggas had once lived in huge herds. "You would find it a bit disillusioning?" he asked. "Not to me. We would have given back to the Karoo - we will have given back to the Karoo - its original zebra. And that will be enough for me." A national-park official in South Africa has called Rau's project 'an academic exercise of very dubious conservation value.' But Rau has not let such opinions demoralize him.
Henry, the closest thing to a quagga in more than a century, on a preserve near Cape Town.
COFFEE
THE LATTE CLASS
New Yorker
On the train up from Philadelphia the other day, Bryant Simon, a professor of history at Temple University, overheard two conversations about Starbucks. When he reached Penn Station, he made a pit stop at the Starbucks at Thirty-fifth Street and Seventh Avenue. Then he began walking toward Grand Central, to catch a Metro-North train uptown, and passed a group of kids on the street, also talking about Starbucks. (“I guess a lot of people like twelve-dollar coffee,” one said.) He was headed for the corner of 125th Street and Lenox Avenue: the site of Harlem’s only Starbucks.
Simon, who is forty-four, is writing a book—a cross between “Bowling Alone” and “Fast Food Nation,” he hopes—about the world’s largest, and seemingly unavoidable, coffee-shop chain, which he has called “the corner bar of the twenty-first century.” Over the past year, he estimates that he’s been to three hundred Starbucks outlets in six countries. He sits in Starbucks for at least twelve hours a week, observing. In the course of his research, Simon has detected the occasional regional variation—in Guadalajara, for example, the Starbucks offers valet parking. But a few basic and universal mores hold true: moms predominate in late morning, teens take over after 3 p.m., and strangers who are not moms or teens must never engage one another.
At the 125th Street Starbucks, Simon quickly noticed a couple of irregularities, such as the hoop earrings belonging to one barista (“She shouldn’t be allowed to wear those”) and the lack of any ambient music or CDs for purchase. (Simon has obtained a copy of the employees’ manual, and is contemplating applying for a summer job.) The store was busy and cramped—too cramped, he thought—and lacked the usual niceties like upholstered furniture. The dinginess struck him as more than coincidence. “It’s a classic American story,” he said. “African-Americans get less of everything.”
Simon and a guest each ordered regular coffees, size Grande. All the tables were occupied, so they waited by the milk dispensers until a man in overalls sitting near the window got up and, in apparent violation of Starbucksian etiquette, approached. “There’s a chair right here, and a chair right there,” the man said, pointing at a couple of empty seats about ten feet apart. “Come on, it’s a community thing.”
Maybe it was a corner bar, after all. Simon took a seat by an elderly woman and a younger one. “I don’t actually know very much about coffee,” he confessed, glancing at the menu of specialty drinks on the wall. “I’ve ordered a mocha Frappuccino before, and hot chocolate. But most of this stuff just sounds gross.”
As he sat, and only occasionally sipped, Simon flipped through a composition book, where he records his Starbucks data. Unlike the man in overalls, Simon prefers not to approach strangers while in Starbucks (“It’s a biased sample”), so, to pass the time, he often counts customers. On one page, from a stop in Singapore, he’d noted forty-eight people between 2:22 p.m. and 3:40 p.m.; all but six stayed and sat. In downtown Philly, by contrast, he saw forty-four in a twenty-oneminute span, thirty-three of whom ordered their drinks to go.
Simon has a number of Starbucks informants, such as his best friend’s niece, a twelve-year-old in Brooklyn Heights. “She calls it Flirtbucks,” he said. “She doesn’t drink coffee—she’s afraid it’ll stunt her growth—but boys try to impress her by drinking coffee drinks.” In Brooklyn Heights, apparently, it is cool to go to Starbucks if you are eleven or twelve, but not once you turn fourteen. “Whereas along the Main Line near Philadelphia, it remains hip until about age twenty,” Simon said.
Back at the Harlem branch, a man gestured toward a plastic bag full of electronics on the floor. “Can I interest you in some headphones?” he asked. Simon declined, and pulled out his computer. He demonstrated that access to Starbucks.com is free, whereas IHateStarbucks.com, say, and StarbucksGossip.com require a T-Mobile account. Aficionados of the latter Web site may be aware of the existence of Winter, another man with a special interest in Starbucks. Winter aims to visit every Starbucks in the world, a feat that does not interest Simon. (Winter’s record of twenty-nine Starbucks visited in one day surpasses Simon’s sixteen.) “They open, like, three to four stores a day,” he said. “To me it just seems like, what’s the guy—is it Sisyphus?—who’s pushing the rock up the hill?”
Simon has a twenty-minute rule of thumb: if you stay at Starbucks twenty minutes or less, you’re drinking; more than twenty minutes, you’re working. After an hour or so, he excused himself to visit the restroom, which he later deemed unimpressive. (“The mirror cost, like, $2.99.”) His cup remained about half full.
posted by D @ 6:36 AM
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