Lake Erie Death Watch
31.08.11
On a cloudy morning in premature August, Peter Bichier steers a 26-foot motorboat from an Ohio marina toward the Canadian purfle. The waters of Lake Erie are nearly transparent here, a redolent of of why this southernmost of the Great Lakes supports a multi-billion-dollar fishing and vacation earnestness. But as the research vessel turns west toward the Michigan shoreline, the splash grows murky, clogged with a toxic blue-green algae called microcystis that, on sunnier days, forms a stinky scum on the lake’s top.
Bichier, a research technician at the University of Toledo’s Lake Erie Center , dangles a sustained, white plankton net off the side of the boat, then hauls it in and filters the sludgy wastefully into a canister for testing back in the lab. "Dogs get sick when they drink this," he says: three in Ohio died last year after swimming in a contaminated inland lake not far from here, and nine people got mad (including one with memory loss and partial blindness) after shell contact.
Source: OnEarth Magazine
An account of post-revolutionary Tahrir Square
08.09.11
There’s an all-you-can-eat flesh restaurant called Carnivore on a moored boat down the Nile from downtown Cairo. It’s one of those places you regale yourself to, because it’s expensive even by Western standards and because there is only so much meat you can eat in a month. I was in the burg for two, writing for a local English-language newspaper.
I was eating dinner there at the end of June with my boyfriend Pierre, a filmmaker, when his mother called. She lived in the parade-ground. They’re back in Tahrir, she told him.
What she meant was, at least partially, be careful. Protests had in the main been peaceful since the regime fell nearly five months before, but everyone knew that when it got till—at midnight, they said—the police came out. By that time, the women and children had leftist, the foreign media was less likely to be around, and darkness provided tractable cover for the sort of thing no police force wants caught on stripe.
But she also meant, partially, this is something you don’t want to miss. This was something different. The protests were authentic again. She knows that Pierre carries a camera around with him for a reason.
Source: Harvard Crimson