Calista's Chicken Fried Chicken

Calista's latest effort, Chicken Fried Chicken, is an exercise in Southern Gothic excess. The protagonist, Johnson Wilson, is nearing the end of a long and mostly happy career teaching linguistics at Cornell. But while he is revered as a spellbinding lecturer, all of his research projects have been small-bore and, at best, workmanlike. He longs to complete a magisterial work befitting his long career.

Meanwhile, Wilson needs money. An acrimonious divorce has left him with only a 1992 Camry and a small and perpetually under-heated house near campus. Early in the book he learns that a friend has received a 6-figure advance to write a popular book on cosmology, and Wilson's envy is palpable.

Wilson is therefore ecstatic when his literary agent, Alain de la Droite, tells him that his book proposal has been accepted by a major publishing house. The advance is generous and the publisher's timeline will allow him to leave Ithaca for two winters in a row to work on The Patois of Southern Louisiana. Wilson practically floats to his daughter's wedding in Brooklyn, where he impulsively foots the bill for a raucous after-party. The next day, after a pleasant brunch with the newlyweds, he heads to Manhattan to sign his book contract.

But when Wilson is ushered into a glassy conference room to complete the formalities, he is in for a surprise. A large cardboard mock-up of his book cover sits on an easel at the end of a table, and de la Droite is waiting for him, grinning ear to ear. But the title on the book is subtly, devastatingly wrong: The Patios of Southern Louisiana. Wilson's mind races. He wants to write a book on linguistics. But he really needs the advance! But surely this is just a misunderstanding? But what if it isn't! Wilson doesn't know anything about patios.

And so it is that after a crash course from a friend in the architecture department, Wilson points his Camry south and into the unknown. The second half of the book follows Wilson as he gamely rings doorbells all across the bayou, brandishing a camera that he barely knows how to use, trying to cobble together enough material for a book that meets his contractual obligations. Wilson is in for more than his share of humiliation, but he also finds hospitality, graciousness, and eventually friendship on his odyssey.

Calista wisely leaves certain questions unanswered. We never learn if Wilson summons the courage to turn in a manuscript on linguistics instead of the book on patios that he has been assembling. We never learn if his marriage proposal, to a federal public defender in New Orleans who rescues him from an alligator while his car is stalled on the shoulder of a rain-drenched highway, is accepted. But what is clear is that, throughout his misadventures, Wilson feels more alive than he has in years, finding some inner source of vigor he didn't know he possessed. And so perhaps de la Droite's typo saved his life. At the very least, it launched a rollicking shaggy dog story that readers will have a hard time putting down.

Calista's Summer '77

Calista's latest effort, Summer '77, is a love story wrapped inside a mystery. Set in South Korea, the movie follows Song Ji-woo, a middle-aged teacher at a rural high school, as he searches for his missing daughter Soo-ji. Intermittently the movie jumps back in time to portray Song's romance with Soo-ji's mother, Jae-eun, which took place against the backdrop of the Korean War.

The movie deploys classic noir tropes, but it is not a playful pastiche. Soo-ji suffers from schizophrenia and Song suspects that she has fallen into the hands of an unscrupulous man she met at college in Busan. But Song's only evidence for this is a letter Soo-ji wrote before she disappeared, and as Song follows clues and interviews her friends and acquaintances, he comes to realize that reality is more complicated. Song doggedly follows up any hint he can find, however hopeless, sweating in the omnipresent heat of the Busan summer. (The weather is almost another character in the film, mentioned by everyone and visible in nearly every scene. From time to time the humidity boils up into violent thunderstorms that bring only temporary relief. Calista realizes the itchy, sweaty atmosphere so convincingly that the movie is almost physically uncomfortable to watch.)

In flashback scenes, Song is no less determined and monomaniacal in his pursuit of Jae-eun. The setting is the same—in the hot summer of 1950, both Song and Jae-eun have fled behind the Pusan Perimeter, the last desperate U.N. holdout against the invading Communists. Jae-eun seems likely to marry her suitor Park Chang-ho, who helped her and her parents flee to safety at considerable risk to himself. Park's heroism makes a persuasive case, but Song desperately begs Jae-eun to choose him instead. Eventually he succeeds, at some cost to his dignity, and in the shambles of war he and Jae-eun start a family.

Back in the 1970s, Song finally finds his daughter with the help of the man he had suspected of abducting her. Tomorrow Song will take Soo-ji back to the rural town where he lives, where Jae-eun is buried. He couldn't rescue Jae-eun's family from the invading Communists, he couldn't save her from cancer, and he knows the storms in Soo-ji's head will never go away. But tonight in Busan he has hired an air-conditioned hotel room he can't afford, and he and Soo-ji are out of the feverish heat. While she sleeps he strokes her back and remembers.

Sarang's Low Background

Sarang's latest effort, Low Background, is surprisingly subdued, a pleasant, low-key diversion from present events. The novel is set in a small town in eastern Tennessee in the early 1990s, and it opens with a calamity—a flood has washed out a large bridge spanning the adjacent river. Luckily no one was hurt, but the bridge will take a long time to replace, and until then residents will have to drive several miles to the next river crossing.

As if that weren't enough, the mayor is soon at loggerheads with representatives of the county and the state over who will pay for the replacement. The problem is that although the bridge was built by the federal government, its ownership (and responsibility for its maintenance) was transferred to the state shortly thereafter. But the state apparently transferred the bridge to the town in the 1950s without fanfare (and without much in the way of documentary evidence). Maintenance costs have traditionally been shared equally between the town and the county, but this arrangement was never formalized (or if it was, the town's beleaguered attorney can't find any evidence of it). Now the state and the county are determined to avoid any financial responsibility for the bridge's replacement. The mayor, on the advice of the town attorney, decides to surrender. The expense will be crushing.

But before the documents are signed, a chance remark by the mayor's daughter sets the story on a new course. In her college physics course she learned that the detonation of atomic bombs starting in 1945 dramatically increased the "background radiation" in the atmosphere, so that steel made after 1945 is contaminated with trace amounts of radioactive material. As a result modern steel emits an elevated amount of radiation—not enough to matter for most purposes, but unacceptably high for delicate instruments such as medical imaging machines and Geiger counters. Manufacturers of those instruments have to pay a premium for "low background" steel, made before the contamination of the atmosphere. The ruined bridge was a cantilever bridge made in the 1930s, so it will be an excellent source of low background steel.

Now the tables are turned. Unfortunately before the documents are signed the hapless town attorney tips his hand, and the state and county immediately change their positions. The state argues that the bridge was never properly transferred to the town and still belongs solely to the state, while the county argues that by sharing maintenance expenses the parties established a "course of conduct" that gives it a one-half ownership stake in the bridge. I won't spoil the conclusion, but needless to say the town is at least spared the cost of replacement.

Low Background is not a long book or a particularly dramatic one. What is distinctive about it is precisely its calm, deliberate, one-damn-thing-after-another plotting, which feels true to life in a way that busier, more elaborate plots often fail to achieve. It captures the tedium of life without becoming tedious. I suppose that's another way to read the title, as an invocation of a calmer time, an elegy for a life of low stakes punctuated by infrequent bursts of energy, before technology made it impossible to be detached from day-to-day microbursts of outrage and nonsense. A way of life that can no longer be sustained, but still something to seek out in its restful graveyards of steel.

Dave's Hybrid Rainbow

Is Dave's latest effort, Hybrid Rainbow, a political game? That's the category in which it was entered for the inaugural Video Games of Merit awards to be given at the New Yorker Ideas Festival. (Sadly the VGMs have been overshadowed by the New Yorker's decision to invite and then disinvite Steve Bannon to the festival. Bannon had no role in selecting the finalists for the VGMs.)

In a sense Hybrid Rainbow is free of politics. In the game, the player runs an engineering company hired to design various exotic structures on alien planets. Functionally the game works much like Kerbal Space Program, except that the engineering is terrestrial and generally conducted on a much larger scale. One of my favorite assignments required me to build tracks for a bullet train along the entire equator of a large planet—I had to build bridges to scale valleys and tunnels to go through mountains, and I ended up using a long string of dirigibles to lift the tracks above a vast ocean. Unfortunately it turns out the game's weather simulator is fairly realistic, so I won't be doing any more projects for that planet.

Throughout all of this, the player has very little choice of what to build. Assignments are put out to bid and the player tries to win them. There is no way to influence the society's priorities. For this reason, critics have argued that the game isn't political at all. Or if it is political, it envisions politics as a technocratic exercise, the solving of optimization problems.

I think this criticism is unfair, or at least incomplete. What it ignores is the way that the game forces the player to observe and participate in the sad trajectory of planetary civilization. At the beginning a given planet, in the first flush of economic success, tends to fund projects of varying degrees of frivolity (such as my ill-fated bullet train). But over time, planets fall into political and economic dysfunction. Environmental problems mount, and more and more resources have to be spent furiously trying to lift the biggest cities above the rising waters, or protecting citizens from an increasingly toxic atmosphere.

And it is at this point that the game can be seen as a political one. The player still doesn't have any power to affect the political choices that planets make, but the player is an involuntary witness to a bleaker and bleaker struggle over planetary resources. By the time a planet has descended into environmental disaster, often the only paying clients are hyper-wealthy private citizens willing to spend vast sums to preserve their luxurious lifestyles at the expense of the rest of the planet. Even in the best-case scenario, where a reasonably free and democratic government remains in control of resource allocation, the hard reality is that only so many cities can be propped up, only so many domes can be paid for. The fate of most democratic planets is to turn to increasingly desperate engineering projects as most of their cities sink beneath the waves.

I feel somewhat embarrassed admitting that this tragedy is also the most visually appealing part of Hybrid Rainbow. After a continent has been submerged, you can still make out its shape just beneath the water, the light blue outline set against the deep blue of the old ocean, swirls of bright clouds swelling over the warm water and then expending themselves over the cold impassive oceans. The violence of the initial onslaught of waves is long over, and only a tranquil patch of shallow sea remains. Here, where the water is a bit darker, is the deep canyon I built a highway through. Over there, you can still see the ghostly shape of the titanic arch that I built over a long-dead city. Coral grows over the financial district where I built a monumental tower, topped with an aluminum statue now cloaked in seaweed.

But little remains of the rich, vibrant society that paid for all those projects. A few floating platforms remain, powered by the sun, stolidly paddling away from huge blooms of colorful toxic algae. They can't afford my services anymore, but I pad my bids on newer, richer planets and use the profits to keep their machines running. As long as I have work, they'll have a shot at survival and, who knows, maybe some kind of renaissance centuries down the line.

The Ballmer Prize Finalists

The short list for the Ballmer Prize is in, and as usual the projects are remarkable. You can see them on special display at the Smithsonian, although as noted below most of the projects require a degree of audience participation that makes it difficult to appreciate them fully there. This year the finalists for the $1 million prize are Alan, Calista, Dave, and Sarang. The theme this year was "the human condition," and the prize will go to the project that best expresses that theme. I don't get a vote anymore (thanks Donna Tartt!), but I will describe the finalist projects for my loyal readers.

Calista's entry, "More Evidence," is deceptively simple. It consists of a giant crossword puzzle spanning hundreds of rows and columns but otherwise following the usual conventions. It is intended to be solved collaboratively, with two or more people starting in different places on the puzzle and eventually working toward each other's completed squares.

The trick is that there is no unique solution—each clue can be solved with at least two possible answers. This ambiguity tends to be resolved based on earlier answers, which lock in certain letters. Those answers, in turn, depend on the happenstance of which answer occurred to the solver first. The puzzle captures how our knowledge of the world comes to us in path dependent ways. Depending on our formative learning experiences, we process later information differently and try to fit it into our existing world view with minimal disruption to its coherence.

In "More Evidence," this can play out in different ways. Some couples solve the puzzle with no discord and are surprised to find the project garnering rave reviews as a work of art. This is because they were serendipitously working toward the same solution the whole time. Other players find that when their filled-out areas started to overlap, they give incompatible answers (that is, each has been working toward a different solution to the overall puzzle). They are forced to reconsider at least one player's work and start over. Of course the problem is deciding which player's work to cast aside, and it neatly captures something deep about the way that people form incompatible but equally valid beliefs about the world. How do you decide whose truth is acceptable and whose must be discarded? And on a psychological level, how do you cast aside so much hard-earned "knowledge" all at once? The resulting fights have been legendary, and at least two spectacular breakups have resulted.

Dave's entry, "Calling All," is perhaps the most ambitious of the finalists. It is a procedurally generated computer game consisting of billions of records—grainy photographs, newspaper stories, emails, transcripts of telephone calls, and so forth. There is no stated goal or win condition, but players have realized that the game invariably depicts the last few weeks of human life on earth around the time of an enormous catastrophe. It's widely assumed that the point of the game is to piece together what happened.

It tends to be a lonely enterprise because a new scenario is generated each time someone plays the game. You can't apply anything learned by anyone else to your particular iteration of the game. (Some players have managed to play collaboratively on a single "run" of the game, though.) Sometimes the world ends in a nuclear cataclysm, sometimes humanity is wiped out by infectious disease. Sometimes the world's institutions simply collapse and we lose the capacity to feed or protect ourselves.

My game happened to involve a military conflict culminating in nuclear war. The nature of the game is that I had more than enough information to piece together what happened (in fact, more records than I could possibly review in a lifetime), but it was nearly impossible to tell whether any particular piece of evidence hid some important meaning. Here's a picture of an Israeli jet flying over Turkey. (Or is it a Russian jet disguised as an Israeli jet?) Here's a transcript of a frantic radio transmission as a Japanese army outpost is overrun. But then, here's a prewar memo from the U.S. Secretary of the Interior about wolves in national parks—can that possibly have any bearing on what happened? (The Secretary, for what it's worth, survived the initial nuclear strike and briefly led the Coalition relief efforts in Alberta.)

The information is voluminous and fragmented and often contradictory. A few players have published compelling timelines for their games, but when they've opened up the data to the public, as often as not the initial timeline gets picked apart as people turn up countervailing evidence. Part of the problem is that with so much information to review, it's impossible to know whether you've reached the truth or whether there is some email or photograph lurking in the archives that will completely change your understanding of events. It's difficult to describe the feeling this creates, but it's a kind of uneasiness paired with frustration and boredom. Most people give up trying long before they form any stable, coherent understanding of the world of the game.

Sarang's entry, "I Want a Lawyer," is a movie following 8 characters over the course of a 24-hour period in Philadelphia. I should say "movies," because "I Want a Lawyer" actually consists of 8 movies, each of which is exactly 24 hours long and depicts everything that happens to one of the characters over the course of that day. The project can only be screened at multiplexes with at least 8 screens, and each member of the audience must choose which screen to watch at any given moment (viewers are allowed to go from screen to screen throughout the viewing). The only way to see every frame of the film is to view it 8 times, and even then you can't take any breaks to sleep or use the restroom. (This is alleviated somewhat by the fact that the camera stays with each character even when he or she is sleeping, so you can catch a break during those downtimes.)

One interesting aspect of "I Want a Lawyer" is what happens when two of the main characters meet. In some cases, Sarang used one shoot (with two cameras) to capture the scene, so that the viewer is seeing the same action take place on screen. This does not mean that you would necessarily come away from the two depictions with the exact same understanding of what happened, of course, but it limits the extent of any divergence.

In other cases, Sarang shot the scenes separately, and fairly significant differences were introduced, presumably reflecting the characters' subjective experiences or memories of the events in question. This makes it extremely challenging, even after viewing all 192 hours of film, to say exactly what happened in the movie. Perhaps the title of the project is a reference to the fact that the way events are understood is inherently up for debate and therefore subject to advocacy. In other words, comprehending the "fact of the matter" is the beginning, not the end, of our journey toward truth.

Finally, Alan's untitled project is in some ways the simplest. It is an old brown dog with a graying muzzle. It lies on a well-worn hair-covered bed and occasionally licks itself or farts. It is friendly enough, and certainly doesn't bite, but it tends not to respond much to human visitors unless they bring cheese.

Sarang's The Angel Critique

Sarang's latest effort, The Angel Critique, is an odd but timely book. Set mostly in Michigan, the book follows T'Quan Phillips, a star football player in his first season for the Detroit Lions, with periodic flashbacks to his time at the University of Michigan and, earlier, playing high school football in his hometown of Flint. As the novel opens, Phillips enjoys something approaching hero status in Michigan, where he led the Wolverines to a national championship and where he is the Lions' only hope for a successful season. It barely catches the reader's attention when Sarang casually mentions that the University of Michigan's computer system has been hacked and its academic records breached. There are far more exciting events to consume our attention, like Phillips' outrageously good 17 touchdowns with only 1 interception during the first five games, all of which the Lions win.

But things fall apart quickly for Phillips once one of his undergraduate papers is made public between game 5 and game 6. The paper focuses on students in inner-city schools and finds that they learn best when they play an active role in deciding how the topic they are studying is presented (I'm simplifying—the actual finding is hard to encapsulate). At first, the paper is downloaded by football fans eager for any insight into their star player, but soon it attracts broader attention on social media, especially Twitter.

That's where it comes to the attention of Murray Angel, an NYU statistician who writes a blog post pointing out flaws in Phillips' methodology. The problem is not so much that Phillips engaged in "p-hacking" (tailoring the numbers to reach a conclusion that crosses the 0.05 "significance" threshold for p-values) or "fishing" (trying many theories until one reaches the significance level, like this)—Angel doesn't find any indication of these things. But the study suffers from what Angel calls the "garden of forking paths": Phillips had too many degrees of freedom. That is, he could have analyzed his data in many different ways, and the particular way he chose to do so was probably shaped by the data itself. This undermines the strength of his conclusion and calls into doubt whether it has any real value. Nevertheless, the paper earned Phillips a B+ and helped him pass the class and ultimately graduate from the University of Michigan, all of which is now cast into doubt in the minds of the public.

Once they've absorbed Angel's bombshell critique, outraged Lions fans turn on Phillips with a vengeance, even as he delivers stellar results on the field. After each victory, during postgame interviews, sports reporters only want to talk about the Angel critique. Ultimately, after a 9-1 start to the season, the Lions have no choice but to bench Phillips, and the team finishes out the season at 10 and 6, barely missing the playoffs. Although his contract will last for two more years, Phillips knows that he will never play another game for the franchise. His career in professional football is effectively over, and because of the ignominious way in which it ended, he is unlikely to get a job in sports writing or broadcasting.

The Angel Critique is unsettling because it shows how our heroes so often fall short of our expectations. Whether it's performance-enhancing drugs, domestic abuse, or the garden of forking paths, our athletes often disappoint us off the field. So why do we keep investing our hopes in them? Why do we insist that they share our values and our politics? Why are we so crushed when they turn out to be deeply flawed?

These are questions that are roiling the world of professional sports, and so Sarang's work is yet again essential to understanding the times we live in.

Heather's The World Is Too Much With Us, Lady Soon

Heather's latest effort, The World Is Too Much With Us, Lady Soon, is a compellingly bizarre novel. Set in a post-apocalyptic future, The World follows Maruyama Natsue, a lecturer in poetry at the Federal University teaching an introductory class in "pre-Restoration poetry" (that is, poetry dating from before the permanent re-establishment of national-level governments in the Western Hemisphere, commonly dated to the Mexico City Conference). Scattered through the book are the poems that Maruyama teaches her students, and it is obvious to the reader that the poems have been handed down through some sort of oral tradition that has allowed errors to creep in. Heather gets a lot of mileage out of the difference between the poems as we know them and the poems as Maruyama teaches them—sometimes the changes are slight, but inevitably meaning is both lost and found in the new poems, sometimes to an astonishing degree. Her students have delightfully idiosyncratic and amusing reactions to the texts, usually awkward and forced, but sometimes containing rare insight.

Interspersed with classroom scenes are passages from an extended conversation Maruyama carries on with an unnamed interlocutor. Walking through Hyde Park, by turns they discuss deep questions and bicker like old friends. Maruyama is taking some sort of personal risk by talking to the man, but we never learn the source of the risk or why she accepts it. Is he a lover? A relative? A political dissident? Merely a friend? The conversation meanders and loops back on itself, giving a sense of stasis and futility. There is something they cannot bring themselves to say, and so they circle it endlessly. What is it that has left them without the words, or without the will to say what needs to be said?

I felt like a detective as I sifted through Maruyama's syllabus looking for clues. But nothing is ever resolved in The World, and when Maruyama and her conversational partner finally make their way to a Tube station, they get on trains going in opposite directions, whisked away from each other in a world struggling to find its way, by flawed memory, in the dark.